Two major announcements are coming out of backup and recovery solutions provider StorageCraft this week, the first a new Linux-based server backup and recovery solution and the latter an update to its StorageCraft Cloud Services.
“Most customers have mixed environments now,” said Fred Trovato, senior director of north America channel sales at StorageCraft Technology Corporation. He was referring to the ShadowProtect SPX solution, which allows backup and recovery of Linux servers, which the company unveiled today.
“Many of our partners have been absolutely dying to get for the last couple of years,” he added. “Most customers are Windows-based but Linux is crucial because they always have a few linux servers in their environments. The opportunity is to go after customers that have mixed environment that want to run and manage everything from one pane.”
According to StorageCraft SPX is designed to allow for quick and efficient sector-level backup of entire Linux systems, including the operating system, applications, settings, services and data.
The company outlined features including the ability to mount and restore volumes, verify backup images, use StorageCraft VirtualBoot to boot a backup as a virtual machine all directly from the image chain browser. Furthermore, there is support for several Linux flavours according to Trovato, including Ubuntu 12.04, RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, and CentOS 6.
The service also integrates with StorageCraft Cloud Services, which the company also revamped. In addition to a new interface and new process, backups are now in native format.
According to Trovato, customers will have to move backups off of the old legacy Cloud Service to the new one, but this can be done over the network or with a seed usb drive which StorageCraft will provide for free. For Canadian clients, the company even has a data centre located in Toronto.
In terms of the market strategy, Trovato said that the fastest growing market seems to be among MSPs, which has expanded over 100 per cent, year on year. As for clients, he said the company’s opportunity lies in self-management.
“They can set up a replication job to the cloud and they can pretty much manage it any way they want,” he said. “If they have a disaster and they want to spin it up, they can do that on their own. A lot of our competitors have to call somebody and get somebody in there to spin the server up. With ours, you don’t have to do that.”