Druva's smarts back up your laptops

Mobility is where we're all going, say the sages, and evidence seems to bear them out. From the kids at home to workers in the office, laptops are ousting desktops in a whole host of situations.

In particular, at work they're being used by people at all levels, allowing them to work wherever they are. But laptops are bit of a problem if you're an enterprise IT manager.

They're on and off the network at unpredictable times, they connect through all sorts of links, some secure, some not, some fast, some slow and, a lot of the time there's simply no idle time to do background maintenance tasks. Users fire up their machines, connect and get on with whatever it is they're supposed to be doing. When they've finished, they log off and put the machines to bed.

Yet those machine contain confidential company information -- they have to or the employee couldn't do their job -- and in a lot of cases they're not being backed up. A lot of the time, I suspect they are not being given the chance to run anti-virus scans either -- but that's a different story.

Enter start-up Druva. Formed by people from Veritas and IBM, it's just opened up shop in the UK and reckons it's got a handle on the laptop backup problem with its flagship product inSync 4.0, which offers a new way of resolving this problem.

In one sense, the software's doing some of what many laptop backup packages have done before with varying degrees of success: using an agent, it's trickling the data out to a backup server while the user is online, but doing so in a way that should not, the company reckons, affect their work.

The twist is that the agent does block-level deduplication. This, says the company, resolves the problem of having to backup large volumes of data across what could be a slow link. The technique involves maintaining a PostgreSQL database on the server of what's already been backed up and only copying across the changes. The server does a real-time search of files that match and how they've changed with time, and instructs the agent what to copy across.

InSync 4.0 also uses some home-grown wide-area network optimisation technology in order to maximise throughput, depending on the kind of network it's traversing. The techniques will be familiar to those versed in network optimisation, and include optimising packet size and latency. It also resumes where it left off if the link disconnects.

It's quite configurable too. You can tell the laptop not to consume all the bandwidth or CPU, and not to back up during first ten minutes of start-up, for example. You can backup just your emails, which means that users can backup local copies, as Exchange servers frequently have quotas of only a few gigabytes -- and Microsoft Outlook quickly builds massive multi-gigabyte files. But if that's not your style, inSync 4.0 also supports Mozilla Thunderbird, Novell's Evolution and Lotus Notes. There's even a Linux agent, the company tells me.

Pioneered by companies such as NetApp and Riverbed, deduplication and WAN optimisation have been well-established technologies in the storage and enterprise backup fields for quite some time. But this is the first time, to my knowledge, that they've been brought together in a laptop backup system. I haven't seen it in action but, if it works, it could be what you need.