HP Application Recovery Manager software Integration guide (March 2008)

1 Integrating the Application
Recovery Manager ZDB
integrations and Microsoft
Volume Shadow Copy Service
Overview
A traditional backup process is based on the direct communication between the
backup application and the application whose data is backed up. This backup
method requires from the backup application an individual interface for each
application it backs up.
The number of applications on the market is constantly increasing. The necessity of
handling application specific features can cause difficulties in backup, restore, and
storage activities. An effective solution to this problem is introducing a coordinator
among the actors of the backup and restore process.
Volume Shadow Copy Service
Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is a software service introduced by Microsoft on
Windows operating systems. This service collaborates with the backup application,
applications to be backed up, shadow copy providers, and the operating system
kernel to implement the management of volume shadow copies and shadow copy
sets.
Application Recovery Manager supports the integration with VSS.
The Application Recovery Manager Volume Shadow Copy integration provides a
unified communication interface that can coordinate backup and restore of an
application regardless of their specific features. With this approach, a backup
application does not need to handle each application to be backed up specifically.
Integration guide 23