Today's large IT environments are dynamic places; applications, volumes, and file systems are added, deleted, and reallocated on SANs on a daily basis. The disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, is updated and tested on an annual basis. As a result, most organizations think their data is better protected than it really is.

If the Oracle DBAs say they need another 1TB LUN (logical disk), a storage administrator may skip step 19 in the official provisioning process that says to add the new LUN, and it’s doppelganger at the DR site to the replication regime. When each management group looks in their management consoles, everything looks hunky dory.

Continuity Software’s RecoveryGuard discovers the Oracle database, which LUNs it’s using, and how they're replicating, and raises the red flag that the Oracle database isn't as protected as we thought it was. RecoveryGuard can investigate Oracle, Sybase, and MS SQL Server databases, and EMC’s SRDF and Network Appliance SNAPmirror replication.

Continuity Software offers a free 48-hour evaluation and a spokesman told me that they have found at least one gap in the data protection at every company that's taken advantage of the offer. Since in our recent survey almost 60% the respondents indicated that they failed to recover at least one of their important applications in their last DR test, I can believe it.

Right now, RecoveryGuard is for the big boys with EMC and NetApp infrastructures that don't mind paying $2,000/protected server/a year to avoid multimillion dollar data losses. For them, it could be a bargain.