Leading Cloud Backup and Recovery Software Provider Doubles Number of Sites Protected in 14 Months and Surpasses 500 Partner Relationship Landmark
TORONTO – Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup and recovery software provider, today announced that it has exceeded 100,000 sites currently protected by the Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup™ platform. This doubles the number of sites protected by Asigra in just over a year’s time, proving that the company continues to extend its leadership position in cloud backup and recovery for both hosted and on-premise environments with technology perfected over more than 20 years. Supporting this growth in deployment, Asigra has reached the 500 partner milestone, highlighting business traction with both channel and technology partners worldwide.
"Asigra's success comes from significantly reducing backup complexity, addressing one of the top complaints companies have about their current data protection solution," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Combine the strength of Asigra's technology, with the company's approach to delivering that technology through a substantial network of partners, and it's no surprise that Asigra continues to achieve such milestones in the market."
Asigra’s rapidly expanding footprint is supported by a global partnership network to provide robust solutions and ensure customer satisfaction. This year, the company was recognized by IDC as a cloud computing solution provider to watch and was voted Best Vendor Partner for Managed Service Providers by Business Solutions magazine, demonstrating Asigra’s technology leadership and channel empowering business model. Additionally, the company recently launched its Hybrid Partner Program to help partners meet customer demand by providing multiple solution delivery options with pricing levels that scale to meet budgetary requirements. With Asigra, partners select a blend of the most appropriate product/service delivery options for their business.
“The Asigra Cloud Backup Recovery platform has alleviated much of the historical burden of backup solutions companies have used in the past, freeing up their resources to focus on other important IT processes,” said Jim Rutherford, president of CoreVault. “Whereas tape backup was an extremely manual process that often resulted in recovery failures, the move to cloud backup and recovery has ended the risk and excessive time requirements.”
Asigra provides agentless deployment and operation with features that automate the backup and recovery process. The platform has broad interoperability, that supports use in nearly any environment including support for Windows, Linux, Unix, Series i and OSX. Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery software for hosted or on-premise cloud-based backup delivers powerful enterprise-class capabilities. The software supports low-touch restriction-free backup vault and computer system growth with grid-based scalability and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for loss-less recoveries. Furthermore, backup data is de-duplicated, compressed, and encrypted at protected sites prior to transport over the business-class WAN to the backup vault for maximum performance, security and efficiency.
“With Asigra we have effectively redesigned our backup environment to provide faster recovery for greater peace-of-mind,” said Anthony Flores, operations manager at Compliance Poster, a leader in labor law poster compliance services. “Compared to our previous tape-based backup solutions, AllConnected’s XiloCore/Asigra-powered cloud backup solution provides much faster and more reliable data recovery services and is especially effective in our VMware-based virtualized server infrastructure. With the critical nature of business continuity, it is no surprise that thousands of other businesses are taking advantage of Asigra as well.”
“Our technology continues to prove itself in thousands of enterprise environments around the world thanks to more than two decades of successfully providing centralized visibility and command over backup and recovery, and the strong focus we have on partners as an integral part of our business model,” said David Farajun, CEO, Asigra. “We are committed to delivering a best of breed solution that enables customers to protect and restore vital enterprise information that is located throughout all organizational computing systems, providing measurable value in cloud-based backup and recovery.”
About AsigraLeading organizations reduce costs by applying cloud computing to backup and recovery with efficient, cost-effective and transformational solutions from Asigra. Customers consistently redirect savings derived from our approach to projects of higher strategic and personal value, many of which have been on-hold for a year or more. The positive business outcomes made possible from a low touch agentless architecture are revealed through Asigra’s Day One ROI™ - an exercise that delivers enormous value with little up-front investment.. The company and its products have been widely acclaimed by leading partners such as CDW, HP and SunGard and renowned Global 2000 enterprises. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.RecoverYourCool.com.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Asigra Partners with Hitachi Data Systems to Bring High-Throughput Cloud Backup and Recovery to the Midmarket
Asigra Joins the Hitachi Data Systems Technology Alliance Program
Asigra v9 Hybrid Cloud Backup™ Platform Certified with Hitachi NAS Platform
TORONTO – Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup and recovery software provider, today announced that it has joined the Hitachi Data Systems Technology Alliance Program. As a Hitachi Data Systems Technical Alliance Program partner, Asigra also announced certification of its Hybrid Cloud Backup™ and Recovery platform with the Hitachi NAS Platform, delivering enterprise-class backup that ingests and stores less and requires minimal management for midmarket organizations. The resulting best-in-class backup and recovery solution overcomes the challenges faced today by users of traditional backup and recovery hardware/software solutions.
Reducing capital and operational costs while optimizing IT environments with high-performance hardware and software solutions remains a high priority among midmarket organizations. Asigra v9 Cloud Backup™ and Recovery software directly addresses cost concerns with an architecture that uses data reducing ingestion and sophisticated global de-duplication to reduce storage under management and increase efficiency. Customers can use Asigra software as part of services provided by a third party or they can purchase and deploy it in their own private cloud. Asigra software provides the flexibility to alternate between these two approaches without requiring reinstallation of the client software.
Hitachi NAS Platform deployed in conjunction with Asigra v9 provides users with a comprehensive backup and recovery solution that eliminates the need for software agents on backup targets to transform data protection. By deploying Hitachi NAS Platform with Asigra v9, users effectively redesign their backup infrastructure with a powerful and efficient backup platform, configurable as a private, public, or hybrid backup cloud to meet both corporate directives and cost requirements.
Asigra v9 integrates smoothly with the Hitachi NAS platform to enhance the value of both platforms. For users with existing or planned virtualized server environments, the joint solution reduces data center space and cooling requirements while simplifying data protection of mixed virtual/physical computing systems with a single powerful backup platform. The Hitachi NAS Platform ensures that mission critical applications continue to run at peak speeds while Asigra’s agentless software operates without draining processing power or memory during backup and recovery operations. With Asigra’s near infinite scalability, Hitachi NAS Platform is perfect for managing growing data volumes without requiring excessive management resources. The joint solution slashes administrative time requirements and costs for protecting information within even the most complex datacenter environments.
“Ensuring data availability via effective backup of data and continuous data protection for applications is of high interest to customers including those with multiple remote locations and a geographically-dispersed workforce,” said Miki Sandorfi, chief strategist, File and Content Services, Hitachi Data Systems. “The Hitachi NAS Platform, combined with Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup’s integrated continuous data protection capability, provides customers with robust data and application protection.”
Asigra provides agentless deployment and operation with features that automate the backup and recovery process. The platform has broad interoperability that supports use in nearly any environment including Windows, Linux, Unix, Series i and OSX. Asigra v9 software for private and/or public cloud-based backup delivers powerful enterprise-class capabilities regardless of organization size and scope. The software supports low-touch management and restriction-free vault and backup target growth with grid-based scalability and the industry’s broadest support for enterprise applications including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL server. With Asigra, backup data is de-duplicated, compressed, and encrypted at protected sites prior to transport over the business-class WAN to the backup vault for maximum performance, security and efficiency.
"As the economy continues to adjust, information growth at midmarket organizations will continue and create data management challenges for IT professionals managing those environments,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “To address these challenges, we are proud to partner with companies like Hitachi Data Systems to deliver simple, yet powerful backup solutions that our channels will be successful with and mutual customers will benefit from.”
About Asigra
Leading organizations reduce costs by applying cloud computing to backup and recovery with efficient, cost-effective and transformational solutions from Asigra. Customers consistently redirect savings derived from our approach to projects of higher strategic and personal value, many of which have been on-hold for a year or more. The positive business outcomes made possible from a low touch agentless architecture are revealed through Asigra’s Day One ROI™ - an exercise that delivers enormous value with little up-front investment.. The company and its products have been widely acclaimed by leading partners such as CDW, HP and SunGard and renowned Global 2000 enterprises. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.RecoverYourCool.com.
###
Asigra and the Asigra logo are trademarks of Asigra Inc. All other brand and product names are, or may be, trademarks of their respective owners
Asigra v9 Hybrid Cloud Backup™ Platform Certified with Hitachi NAS Platform
TORONTO – Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup and recovery software provider, today announced that it has joined the Hitachi Data Systems Technology Alliance Program. As a Hitachi Data Systems Technical Alliance Program partner, Asigra also announced certification of its Hybrid Cloud Backup™ and Recovery platform with the Hitachi NAS Platform, delivering enterprise-class backup that ingests and stores less and requires minimal management for midmarket organizations. The resulting best-in-class backup and recovery solution overcomes the challenges faced today by users of traditional backup and recovery hardware/software solutions.
Reducing capital and operational costs while optimizing IT environments with high-performance hardware and software solutions remains a high priority among midmarket organizations. Asigra v9 Cloud Backup™ and Recovery software directly addresses cost concerns with an architecture that uses data reducing ingestion and sophisticated global de-duplication to reduce storage under management and increase efficiency. Customers can use Asigra software as part of services provided by a third party or they can purchase and deploy it in their own private cloud. Asigra software provides the flexibility to alternate between these two approaches without requiring reinstallation of the client software.
Hitachi NAS Platform deployed in conjunction with Asigra v9 provides users with a comprehensive backup and recovery solution that eliminates the need for software agents on backup targets to transform data protection. By deploying Hitachi NAS Platform with Asigra v9, users effectively redesign their backup infrastructure with a powerful and efficient backup platform, configurable as a private, public, or hybrid backup cloud to meet both corporate directives and cost requirements.
Asigra v9 integrates smoothly with the Hitachi NAS platform to enhance the value of both platforms. For users with existing or planned virtualized server environments, the joint solution reduces data center space and cooling requirements while simplifying data protection of mixed virtual/physical computing systems with a single powerful backup platform. The Hitachi NAS Platform ensures that mission critical applications continue to run at peak speeds while Asigra’s agentless software operates without draining processing power or memory during backup and recovery operations. With Asigra’s near infinite scalability, Hitachi NAS Platform is perfect for managing growing data volumes without requiring excessive management resources. The joint solution slashes administrative time requirements and costs for protecting information within even the most complex datacenter environments.
“Ensuring data availability via effective backup of data and continuous data protection for applications is of high interest to customers including those with multiple remote locations and a geographically-dispersed workforce,” said Miki Sandorfi, chief strategist, File and Content Services, Hitachi Data Systems. “The Hitachi NAS Platform, combined with Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup’s integrated continuous data protection capability, provides customers with robust data and application protection.”
Asigra provides agentless deployment and operation with features that automate the backup and recovery process. The platform has broad interoperability that supports use in nearly any environment including Windows, Linux, Unix, Series i and OSX. Asigra v9 software for private and/or public cloud-based backup delivers powerful enterprise-class capabilities regardless of organization size and scope. The software supports low-touch management and restriction-free vault and backup target growth with grid-based scalability and the industry’s broadest support for enterprise applications including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL server. With Asigra, backup data is de-duplicated, compressed, and encrypted at protected sites prior to transport over the business-class WAN to the backup vault for maximum performance, security and efficiency.
"As the economy continues to adjust, information growth at midmarket organizations will continue and create data management challenges for IT professionals managing those environments,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “To address these challenges, we are proud to partner with companies like Hitachi Data Systems to deliver simple, yet powerful backup solutions that our channels will be successful with and mutual customers will benefit from.”
About Asigra
Leading organizations reduce costs by applying cloud computing to backup and recovery with efficient, cost-effective and transformational solutions from Asigra. Customers consistently redirect savings derived from our approach to projects of higher strategic and personal value, many of which have been on-hold for a year or more. The positive business outcomes made possible from a low touch agentless architecture are revealed through Asigra’s Day One ROI™ - an exercise that delivers enormous value with little up-front investment.. The company and its products have been widely acclaimed by leading partners such as CDW, HP and SunGard and renowned Global 2000 enterprises. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.RecoverYourCool.com.
###
Asigra and the Asigra logo are trademarks of Asigra Inc. All other brand and product names are, or may be, trademarks of their respective owners
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Asigra Named Among "10 Canadian Cloud Solutions to Watch"
Leading analyst firm profiles Canadian cloud solution providers in recent report
TORONTO – Asigra Inc., the leading cloud backup and recovery software provider, today announced that International Data Corporation (IDC) Canada has named the company one of “10 Canadian Cloud Solutions to Watch” in a recent study released this month. In the report, IDC provides insight into Asigra’s Cloud Backup™ platform as well as the company’s go-to-market strategy, partners, and customers. Other companies that were profiled in the report include BoardSuite, CiRBA, Enomaly, FreshBooks, Nulogy, PollStream, Rypple, Teradici, and ThinDesk.
"Cloud computing is still only in the nascent stages in Canada, but is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years," says Krista Napier, senior analyst, Competitive Intelligence and Emerging Technology at IDC Canada. IDC estimates that By 2012, 9% of spending on IT services worldwide, including business applications, application development and deployment, system infrastructure software, storage and servers, will be in the Cloud – the leading area of IT growth (IT Cloud Services Forecast, Oct 2008).
Asigra provides next generation hybrid cloud backup and recovery software aligned with cloud computing and designed to offer backup efficiencies unavailable with traditional backup architectures by allowing users to capture less, ingest less, and store less data. As a result, organizations using the Asigra platform are able to reduce the amount of backup assets they have to buy, manage, and maintain. Customers can leverage the Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery technology on-premise, through a service provider or both (hybrid deployment) to optimize, economize and modernize their backup processes.
“Being recognized by IDC as a cloud solution provider to watch is an honor that recognizes the hard work behind the software and company,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president for Asigra. “We continue to remain at the forefront of cloud backup and embrace the cloud as a powerful way to reduce capital and operational costs while improving security, reliability and performance. Recognition by IDC validates our approach and execution.”
Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup is available through the Asigra partner network. Organizations can opt to deploy the software directly onsite or select a service provider powered by Asigra for offsite backup or both. Pricing for the platform starts as low as $500 and scales based on environment. Organizations interested in learning more about cloud backup can visit Asigra at http://asigra.com/#/the-product/. Service providers and VARs interested in partnering with Asigra can review opportunities at http://asigra.com/#/partnering/ for more information.
About Asigra
Leading organizations reduce costs by applying cloud computing to backup and recovery with efficient, cost-effective and transformational solutions from Asigra. Customers consistently redirect savings derived from our approach to projects of higher strategic and personal value, many of which have been on-hold for a year or more. The positive business outcomes made possible from a low touch agentless architecture are revealed through Asigra’s Day One ROI™ - an exercise that delivers enormous value with little up-front investment.. The company and its products have been widely acclaimed by leading partners such as CDW, HP and SunGard and renowned Global 2000 enterprises. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.RecoverYourCool.com.
TORONTO – Asigra Inc., the leading cloud backup and recovery software provider, today announced that International Data Corporation (IDC) Canada has named the company one of “10 Canadian Cloud Solutions to Watch” in a recent study released this month. In the report, IDC provides insight into Asigra’s Cloud Backup™ platform as well as the company’s go-to-market strategy, partners, and customers. Other companies that were profiled in the report include BoardSuite, CiRBA, Enomaly, FreshBooks, Nulogy, PollStream, Rypple, Teradici, and ThinDesk.
"Cloud computing is still only in the nascent stages in Canada, but is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years," says Krista Napier, senior analyst, Competitive Intelligence and Emerging Technology at IDC Canada. IDC estimates that By 2012, 9% of spending on IT services worldwide, including business applications, application development and deployment, system infrastructure software, storage and servers, will be in the Cloud – the leading area of IT growth (IT Cloud Services Forecast, Oct 2008).
Asigra provides next generation hybrid cloud backup and recovery software aligned with cloud computing and designed to offer backup efficiencies unavailable with traditional backup architectures by allowing users to capture less, ingest less, and store less data. As a result, organizations using the Asigra platform are able to reduce the amount of backup assets they have to buy, manage, and maintain. Customers can leverage the Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery technology on-premise, through a service provider or both (hybrid deployment) to optimize, economize and modernize their backup processes.
“Being recognized by IDC as a cloud solution provider to watch is an honor that recognizes the hard work behind the software and company,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president for Asigra. “We continue to remain at the forefront of cloud backup and embrace the cloud as a powerful way to reduce capital and operational costs while improving security, reliability and performance. Recognition by IDC validates our approach and execution.”
Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup is available through the Asigra partner network. Organizations can opt to deploy the software directly onsite or select a service provider powered by Asigra for offsite backup or both. Pricing for the platform starts as low as $500 and scales based on environment. Organizations interested in learning more about cloud backup can visit Asigra at http://asigra.com/#/the-product/. Service providers and VARs interested in partnering with Asigra can review opportunities at http://asigra.com/#/partnering/ for more information.
About Asigra
Leading organizations reduce costs by applying cloud computing to backup and recovery with efficient, cost-effective and transformational solutions from Asigra. Customers consistently redirect savings derived from our approach to projects of higher strategic and personal value, many of which have been on-hold for a year or more. The positive business outcomes made possible from a low touch agentless architecture are revealed through Asigra’s Day One ROI™ - an exercise that delivers enormous value with little up-front investment.. The company and its products have been widely acclaimed by leading partners such as CDW, HP and SunGard and renowned Global 2000 enterprises. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.RecoverYourCool.com.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Cloud Storage: Issues to Consider
Processor Magazine: Cloud Storage: Issues To Consider
Services Offer Attractive Pricing & Great Flexibility, But They Come With Pitfalls
Key Points
• Cloud storage services can provide fully managed capacity at a fraction of the cost most enterprises can procure and operate internal storage infrastructure.
• A lack of standard access protocols and the need to use proprietary APIs means using cloud storage is complex and can make migrating data between cloud vendors difficult.
• Because of inherent WAN performance limitations, cloud storage is ideally suited for static, infrequently accessed information such as archives or applications such as Web 2.0 content that are already in the cloud.
Net-savvy individuals increasingly use online storage to back up their local PCs. These cloud storage services have been joined by a slew of alternatives targeting the enterprise.
But this isn’t such a novel concept. As Burton Group storage analyst Gene Ruth points out, “we’ve been here before,” noting that as early as 2000, Enron attempted to broker online storage. Ruth notes that those fledgling efforts failed primarily because of technological limitations. However, today’s era of fast and cheap Internet bandwidth and voluminous storage systems have changed that.
Cloud storage gets the attention of IT managers with its comparatively low cost and ability to easily adjust capacity. For example, Dragon Slayer Consulting estimates that the so-called “burdened cost of storage,” which encompasses the TCO for storage hardware and associated administration overhead normalized on a per-gigabyte basis, is about $15 per year for an in-house Tier 2 solution (used primarily as secondary storage for unstructured data or backup) vs. $3 per year for a storage delivery network.
A recent report from Gartner examining the benefits, risks, and costs of cloud storage finds a comparable 5.5-to-1 cost advantage for cloud storage providers. Gartner concludes, “End users cannot match cloud storage vendor’s total costs of ownership (TCOs) unless they are willing to build and maintain their own storage solutions.”
Although cloud storage offers some powerful financial incentives, potential customers face a host of technical, integration, security, and organizational issues.
Interoperability & Control
A major source of CIO anxiety, according to Ruth, is an enterprise’s perceived loss of control over data once it’s outside the enterprise’s facilities. Although the concerns are largely hypothetical and psychological rather than actual, he notes that given the immaturity of cloud services and their evolving business model, users can have legitimate concerns about a vendor’s viability and operational processes.
Eran Farajun, executive vice president at Asigra (www.asigra.com), makes a distinction between control of data and custody, arguing that cloud storage maintains user control while offloading day-to-day operational custody of the data. He compares using cloud infrastructure to putting money in a bank vault vs. hiding it under a mattress—customers should use the same diligence when evaluating cloud vendors as they do in vetting financial institutions.
Other concerns Ruth sees include the difficulties of monitoring compliance with service levels, the need for data migration contingencies should the vendor violate SLAs, and legal or regulatory ambiguities when using shared storage.
The complexity of actually using cloud storage is something Gartner principal analyst Adam Couture says many customers underestimate: “It’s not plug-and-play.” He notes that each vendor has different access methods involving custom, nonstandard APIs that make integrating applications such as archiving or file shares with cloud storage difficult and costly. Couture is aware of one large enterprise that spent $250,000 on custom programming to get a particular application and its data onto a cloud service.
In general, using cloud storage isn’t as simple as plugging in a NAS device and mapping a network drive. Couture notes that some vendors provide software clients that implement common network file sharing protocols such as NFS or CIFS, but these are proprietary and cannot bridge between different cloud services. The lack of standard protocols for accessing cloud storage means there is no interoperability between cloud storage providers, greatly complicating data migration, which Ruth says can easily lead to vendor lock-in.
Performance & Security
Access to cloud data is inherently limited by network throughput and latency, and despite dramatic improvements in Internet performance, it still pales in comparison to a local SAN. Although some vendors attempt to enhance throughput with various local caching and compression techniques such as those used for WAN acceleration or content delivery networks, as Ruth points out, these don’t improve Internet latency.
Gartner’s Couture considers data security as the biggest issue with cloud storage. Given the leakage potential, both in transit and within a shared infrastructure, experts agree that using encryption on all data stored in a cloud is essential, although, depending on the application, this is easier said than done. Ruth notes that unlike consumer-oriented products, enterprise storage services typically leave encryption setup and management to the customer. However, as Couture cautions, managing encryption keys is not to be taken lightly and can be an administrative nightmare.
Applications For Cloud Storage
When considering applications for cloud storage, Farajun says it’s important to understand the nature of the data being stored. He categorizes four levels based on activity, persistence, and availability (see the “Stages Of Stored Data” chart) and feels more static, inactive data, such as applications that include online backup and archiving, is the best fit for cloud storage.
Couture agrees that archiving works well in the cloud because the data changes less frequently; doesn’t require high-speed, transactional access; can be easily compressed using data reduction technologies such as differential backups and deduplication; and can be easily encrypted in bulk. Archiving software increasingly integrates cloud support directly into the product, which makes using cloud services and data encryption much simpler.
Other potential applications for cloud storage include content delivery of rich media such as video, audio, or image-rich files on a global scale; data for collaboration or Web 2.0 applications; and user file or email repositories. Greg Schulz, principal analyst at StorageIO, summarizes the sweet spot for cloud storage as any application with low I/O performance, a focus on driving down cost, and tolerance for occasional downtime.
Although public cloud-based services have run off scale on the hype meter, cloud storage can have tangible business benefits by quickly reducing an IT department’s CAPEX budget while providing what Asigra’s Farajun describes as “elasticity” in provisioning capacity.
All experts emphasize that anyone considering a cloud service needs to thoroughly understand the vendor’s service levels, pricing plans, data access methods, and operational and security processes, while also having contingency plans for data migration should the enterprise eventually wish to change vendors.
by Kurt Marko
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3117%2F33p17%2F33p17%2F33p17.asp&guid=&searchtype=&WordList=&bJumpTo=True
Services Offer Attractive Pricing & Great Flexibility, But They Come With Pitfalls
Key Points
• Cloud storage services can provide fully managed capacity at a fraction of the cost most enterprises can procure and operate internal storage infrastructure.
• A lack of standard access protocols and the need to use proprietary APIs means using cloud storage is complex and can make migrating data between cloud vendors difficult.
• Because of inherent WAN performance limitations, cloud storage is ideally suited for static, infrequently accessed information such as archives or applications such as Web 2.0 content that are already in the cloud.
Net-savvy individuals increasingly use online storage to back up their local PCs. These cloud storage services have been joined by a slew of alternatives targeting the enterprise.
But this isn’t such a novel concept. As Burton Group storage analyst Gene Ruth points out, “we’ve been here before,” noting that as early as 2000, Enron attempted to broker online storage. Ruth notes that those fledgling efforts failed primarily because of technological limitations. However, today’s era of fast and cheap Internet bandwidth and voluminous storage systems have changed that.
Cloud storage gets the attention of IT managers with its comparatively low cost and ability to easily adjust capacity. For example, Dragon Slayer Consulting estimates that the so-called “burdened cost of storage,” which encompasses the TCO for storage hardware and associated administration overhead normalized on a per-gigabyte basis, is about $15 per year for an in-house Tier 2 solution (used primarily as secondary storage for unstructured data or backup) vs. $3 per year for a storage delivery network.
A recent report from Gartner examining the benefits, risks, and costs of cloud storage finds a comparable 5.5-to-1 cost advantage for cloud storage providers. Gartner concludes, “End users cannot match cloud storage vendor’s total costs of ownership (TCOs) unless they are willing to build and maintain their own storage solutions.”
Although cloud storage offers some powerful financial incentives, potential customers face a host of technical, integration, security, and organizational issues.
Interoperability & Control
A major source of CIO anxiety, according to Ruth, is an enterprise’s perceived loss of control over data once it’s outside the enterprise’s facilities. Although the concerns are largely hypothetical and psychological rather than actual, he notes that given the immaturity of cloud services and their evolving business model, users can have legitimate concerns about a vendor’s viability and operational processes.
Eran Farajun, executive vice president at Asigra (www.asigra.com), makes a distinction between control of data and custody, arguing that cloud storage maintains user control while offloading day-to-day operational custody of the data. He compares using cloud infrastructure to putting money in a bank vault vs. hiding it under a mattress—customers should use the same diligence when evaluating cloud vendors as they do in vetting financial institutions.
Other concerns Ruth sees include the difficulties of monitoring compliance with service levels, the need for data migration contingencies should the vendor violate SLAs, and legal or regulatory ambiguities when using shared storage.
The complexity of actually using cloud storage is something Gartner principal analyst Adam Couture says many customers underestimate: “It’s not plug-and-play.” He notes that each vendor has different access methods involving custom, nonstandard APIs that make integrating applications such as archiving or file shares with cloud storage difficult and costly. Couture is aware of one large enterprise that spent $250,000 on custom programming to get a particular application and its data onto a cloud service.
In general, using cloud storage isn’t as simple as plugging in a NAS device and mapping a network drive. Couture notes that some vendors provide software clients that implement common network file sharing protocols such as NFS or CIFS, but these are proprietary and cannot bridge between different cloud services. The lack of standard protocols for accessing cloud storage means there is no interoperability between cloud storage providers, greatly complicating data migration, which Ruth says can easily lead to vendor lock-in.
Performance & Security
Access to cloud data is inherently limited by network throughput and latency, and despite dramatic improvements in Internet performance, it still pales in comparison to a local SAN. Although some vendors attempt to enhance throughput with various local caching and compression techniques such as those used for WAN acceleration or content delivery networks, as Ruth points out, these don’t improve Internet latency.
Gartner’s Couture considers data security as the biggest issue with cloud storage. Given the leakage potential, both in transit and within a shared infrastructure, experts agree that using encryption on all data stored in a cloud is essential, although, depending on the application, this is easier said than done. Ruth notes that unlike consumer-oriented products, enterprise storage services typically leave encryption setup and management to the customer. However, as Couture cautions, managing encryption keys is not to be taken lightly and can be an administrative nightmare.
Applications For Cloud Storage
When considering applications for cloud storage, Farajun says it’s important to understand the nature of the data being stored. He categorizes four levels based on activity, persistence, and availability (see the “Stages Of Stored Data” chart) and feels more static, inactive data, such as applications that include online backup and archiving, is the best fit for cloud storage.
Couture agrees that archiving works well in the cloud because the data changes less frequently; doesn’t require high-speed, transactional access; can be easily compressed using data reduction technologies such as differential backups and deduplication; and can be easily encrypted in bulk. Archiving software increasingly integrates cloud support directly into the product, which makes using cloud services and data encryption much simpler.
Other potential applications for cloud storage include content delivery of rich media such as video, audio, or image-rich files on a global scale; data for collaboration or Web 2.0 applications; and user file or email repositories. Greg Schulz, principal analyst at StorageIO, summarizes the sweet spot for cloud storage as any application with low I/O performance, a focus on driving down cost, and tolerance for occasional downtime.
Although public cloud-based services have run off scale on the hype meter, cloud storage can have tangible business benefits by quickly reducing an IT department’s CAPEX budget while providing what Asigra’s Farajun describes as “elasticity” in provisioning capacity.
All experts emphasize that anyone considering a cloud service needs to thoroughly understand the vendor’s service levels, pricing plans, data access methods, and operational and security processes, while also having contingency plans for data migration should the enterprise eventually wish to change vendors.
by Kurt Marko
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3117%2F33p17%2F33p17%2F33p17.asp&guid=&searchtype=&WordList=&bJumpTo=True
Asigra and BlueArc Broaden Strategic Relationship
Asigra and BlueArc Broaden Strategic Relationship to Deliver High-Performance Backup and Recovery Infrastructure to Broader Market Segment
Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup™ Platform Certified with BlueArc Mercury™ Series Storage
TORONTO – July 7, 2009 – Asigra Inc., the leading cloud backup and recovery software provider, today announced that the Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup™ and Recovery platform supports BlueArc’s new Mercury Series Network Storage System as a premier hardware platform for enhanced backup and recovery. When combined with Asigra, BlueArc’s Mercury Series delivers enterprise-class scalability and performance in a mid-range solution that overcomes the challenges faced today by an ever-increasing number of end users and cloud backup service providers.
IT operation requirements to reduce capital and operational costs while meeting demands to do more with less are necessitating more powerful solutions without additional expense. Asigra’s cloud backup and recovery software directly addresses cost concerns with an architecture that reduces I/O, memory and management overhead that is a fundamental trait of traditional data protection offerings. With BlueArc’s Mercury Series storage servers deployed in conjunction with Asigra, users are provided a comprehensive enterprise-class backup and recovery solution that transforms data protection to significantly lower resource requirements and allow for focus on more strategic IT initiatives than backup.
Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery software version 9 integrates smoothly with BlueArc’s Mercury Series to extend the value of both platforms. For customers employing virtualization schemes to reduce their data center footprint, Mercury’s performance ensures that consolidated applications continue to run at peak speeds while Asigra’s agentless deployment runs without draining processing power or memory during backup and recovery operations. With Asigra’s near infinite scalability, BlueArc Mercury Series is the perfect complement to managing growing data volumes without excessive management resources. The combined offering also lowers administrative time and costs for protecting information within virtualized datacenter environments.
“Today, organizations seek faster, higher capacity and more efficient storage to cope with the imposing demands of their hard working IT infrastructures,” said Bridget Warwick, vice president of marketing at BlueArc. “BlueArc’s Mercury Series serves as the great equalizer in mitigating the impact of information overload and is a powerful hardware platform for driving the industry’s most popular applications, as is the case with the Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery offering.”
"Regardless of the economy, information growth continues to drive IT priorities - an increasing challenge for organizations drawing from shrinking IT budgets,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “As a result of our relationships with partners such as BlueArc, we are providing customers with a simple answer to complex backup and recovery concerns. As a result, IT resources are being utilized for projects that move the business forward versus getting caught up in the minutiae of backup.”
About BlueArc
BlueArc partners with customers to solve their storage and data management-related business challenges. BlueArc’s best-of-breed, high-performance, highly scalable and cost-effective storage solutions help to accelerate our customers' success. Information about BlueArc solutions and services can be found at http://www.bluearc.com.
About Asigra
Leading organizations reduce costs by applying cloud computing to backup and recovery with efficient, cost-effective and transformational solutions from Asigra. Customers consistently redirect savings derived from our approach to projects of higher strategic and personal value, many of which have been on-hold for a year or more. The positive business outcomes made possible from a low touch agentless architecture are revealed through Asigra’s Day One ROI™ - an exercise that delivers enormous value with little up-front investment. The company and its products have been widely acclaimed by leading partners such as CDW, HP and SunGard and renowned Global 2000 enterprises. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.RecoverYourCool.com.
Asigra and the Asigra logo are trademarks of Asigra Inc. All other brand and
product names are, or may be, trademarks of their respective owners.
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Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup™ Platform Certified with BlueArc Mercury™ Series Storage
TORONTO – July 7, 2009 – Asigra Inc., the leading cloud backup and recovery software provider, today announced that the Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup™ and Recovery platform supports BlueArc’s new Mercury Series Network Storage System as a premier hardware platform for enhanced backup and recovery. When combined with Asigra, BlueArc’s Mercury Series delivers enterprise-class scalability and performance in a mid-range solution that overcomes the challenges faced today by an ever-increasing number of end users and cloud backup service providers.
IT operation requirements to reduce capital and operational costs while meeting demands to do more with less are necessitating more powerful solutions without additional expense. Asigra’s cloud backup and recovery software directly addresses cost concerns with an architecture that reduces I/O, memory and management overhead that is a fundamental trait of traditional data protection offerings. With BlueArc’s Mercury Series storage servers deployed in conjunction with Asigra, users are provided a comprehensive enterprise-class backup and recovery solution that transforms data protection to significantly lower resource requirements and allow for focus on more strategic IT initiatives than backup.
Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery software version 9 integrates smoothly with BlueArc’s Mercury Series to extend the value of both platforms. For customers employing virtualization schemes to reduce their data center footprint, Mercury’s performance ensures that consolidated applications continue to run at peak speeds while Asigra’s agentless deployment runs without draining processing power or memory during backup and recovery operations. With Asigra’s near infinite scalability, BlueArc Mercury Series is the perfect complement to managing growing data volumes without excessive management resources. The combined offering also lowers administrative time and costs for protecting information within virtualized datacenter environments.
“Today, organizations seek faster, higher capacity and more efficient storage to cope with the imposing demands of their hard working IT infrastructures,” said Bridget Warwick, vice president of marketing at BlueArc. “BlueArc’s Mercury Series serves as the great equalizer in mitigating the impact of information overload and is a powerful hardware platform for driving the industry’s most popular applications, as is the case with the Asigra Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery offering.”
"Regardless of the economy, information growth continues to drive IT priorities - an increasing challenge for organizations drawing from shrinking IT budgets,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “As a result of our relationships with partners such as BlueArc, we are providing customers with a simple answer to complex backup and recovery concerns. As a result, IT resources are being utilized for projects that move the business forward versus getting caught up in the minutiae of backup.”
About BlueArc
BlueArc partners with customers to solve their storage and data management-related business challenges. BlueArc’s best-of-breed, high-performance, highly scalable and cost-effective storage solutions help to accelerate our customers' success. Information about BlueArc solutions and services can be found at http://www.bluearc.com.
About Asigra
Leading organizations reduce costs by applying cloud computing to backup and recovery with efficient, cost-effective and transformational solutions from Asigra. Customers consistently redirect savings derived from our approach to projects of higher strategic and personal value, many of which have been on-hold for a year or more. The positive business outcomes made possible from a low touch agentless architecture are revealed through Asigra’s Day One ROI™ - an exercise that delivers enormous value with little up-front investment. The company and its products have been widely acclaimed by leading partners such as CDW, HP and SunGard and renowned Global 2000 enterprises. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.RecoverYourCool.com.
Asigra and the Asigra logo are trademarks of Asigra Inc. All other brand and
product names are, or may be, trademarks of their respective owners.
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