Service providers and telecommunications companies have been offering cloud-based software and infrastructure services for several years. But data protection as a service, which could be equally of interest to enterprises, hasn’t been as easy to offer.
Asigra Inc. a Toronto provider of a cloud backup service has partnered with storage array manufacturer NetApp Inc. to offer Asigra Cloud Backup, a bundle of hardware and storage they believe meets a need of providers.
“The goal was really to try to accelerate time to market for service providers and telcos to launch new backup services,” said Doug Ko, director of strategic alliances and product marketing.
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The bundle includes the newly-released Asigra Cloud Backup version 11.2 plus NetApp’s FAS arrays. The two companies have been partners for some time. There is no special pricing for the three bundles, Ko said, but they come with best practices and configuration advice to get the service up relatively quickly.
Service providers sometimes suffer from “paralysis from analysis,” Ko said, trying to figure out target markets, pricing and other factors.
“With the turnkey approach and pre-defined bundles, we can take a deployment of months into weeks,” Ko said.
The three bundles come in small (up to 10 TB of storage), medium (up to 50 TB) and large (up to 100 TB).
NetApp or Asigra partners do the implementation.
Asigra Cloud Backup is an agentless solution with several elements:
- The DS-Client sits on the customers’ local area network and collects data from virtualized platforms, end user devices and their applications. In addition to performing de-duplication, encryption and data compression, it allows the service provider to do all maintenance remotely;
- The DS-Mobile client for laptops, DS-SmartPhone Client for handsets and the DS-Tablet Client for tablets;
- Data is then sent for storage and managed by the DS-System, located in the provider’s data centre.
- Options include the ability to replicate data to a separate location and to send older data to an archive.
In Canada, Asigra’s target buyers include the country’s Tier 1 carriers as well as large Internet providers.
Asigra Cloud Backup v11.2, which can be bought on its own by service providers and enterprises, has a number of improvements over the previous version, Ko said. These include deeper array snapshot integration – including data snapshots at the edge of the cloud as well as within the data centre — increased backup performance, service delivery enhancements and increased support for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Zen virtualization and the latest mobile operating systems.
Cloud Backup is licenced by capacity of each cloud a provider offers – and they could offer a combination of public and private clouds to enterprises or consumers. Through a licence server, these can be managed as a global pool of licences that can be deployed across more than one cloud as capacity rises or falls. It also allows a provider to wholesale licences to smaller providers.