Asigra Reveals Key Technologies Ensuring Positive Business Outcomes for Cloud Backup and Recovery

April 19, 2011 - PRLog -- TORONTO – April 18, 2011 – Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup and recovery software provider since 1986, today highlighted internal field research showing businesses and service providers using cloud-based backup and recovery solutions are achieving significant return on IT investments. The returns cited include major reductions in hardware and software investments, lower operational expenditures, greatly reduced maintenance and support related expenses and better utilization of IT resources to focus on more strategic IT objectives.

These advantages are being driven by technologies that allow unrestricted reach of cloud-based data protection and recovery across mixed operating system and physical and/or virtual environments for holistic data protection to eliminate the traditional cocktail of backup and disaster recovery applications to purchase, manage and maintain. The acquisition, management and maintenance costs of managing multiple islands of data protection for virtual environments, databases, business systems, communications and disparate operating environments is mitigated with an open cloud backup solution.

Capital costs are also further reduced by the reduction of storage requirements using advanced local and global deduplication. Rather than inefficient deduplication scenarios, such as redundant deduplication at each tier of data protection which unnecessary tax CPUs and slow system operations, local deduplication takes place at the end customer LAN or remote site where necessary to reduce data load before traveling across the WAN, while global deduplication takes place to stop duplicate data from being sent to the datacenter. Global deduplication has proven to significantly reduce storage hardware requirements without impacting backup performance at both small and large enterprise operations. The intelligent management of this backup data using tiered backup and recovery then allows the user to align recovery time objectives and storage costs based on the value of the data which is set by the user through policies.

With the adoption of cloud backup on the rise and many solutions available for use in private, public or hybrid cloud environments, users are tasked with determining the most appropriate solution for their environment based on interoperability, feature set and costs. Asigra Cloud Backup is designed to offer backup efficiencies unavailable with traditional backup architecture by allowing organizations to capture less, ingest less, and store less data -- reducing the amount of backup assets to buy, manage and maintain.

Asigra advantages providing significant management and cost advantages over all other traditional and cloud backup solutions include:
• Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR) - The Asigra platform provides a straightforward means for providing Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR), proven in thousands of customer deployments. Asigra’s ability to recover back to disparate hardware configurations provides an inherent capability to restore physical servers to virtual servers (P2V) while preserving the granularity of restoring individual files.
• Local and global deduplication – Local deduplication prevents storage of redundant data when backing up data to the local recovery appliance. Global data deduplication makes the process more efficient by deduplicating across all sites, increasing the data deduplication ratio (the ratio of protected capacity to the actual physical capacity stored), which helps to reduce the required capacity of storage hardware for backup data.
• Most open (physical/virtual) cloud backup platform available – Asigra’s complete interoperability across mixed physical and virtual environments includes all popular makes and models of virtual server software (VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, etc.) and most storage hardware platforms available in the marketplace.
• Tiered recovery – Tiered recovery is an advanced cloud backup feature giving organizations the ability to cater their solution to meet an organization’s data availability requirements. Asigra offers the option of having four tiers of data backup and recovery which is achieved through Backup Lifecycle Management and Local-only backup. Data movement between tiers is automated based on customer defined retention rules.

For Virtual Disaster Recovery, restoring from one hardware configuration to a different hardware configuration is performed without reinstalling software applications, patches, services packs, etc. The solution’s ability to restore physical servers to any virtual environment (P2V) preserves the granularity of restoring individual files required for recovery. With this capability, Asigra provides a means to easily recreate a company’s physical environment within the realm of a virtual environment. The value of restoring a physical computing environment into a virtual environment while maintaining the ability to restore data at a very granular level provides the framework for a Virtual Disaster Recovery strategy.

As a holistic data management solution, Asigra Cloud Backup encompasses traditional and innovative technologies in a single code base and common platform, protecting everything from laptops to data centers. Asigra Cloud Backup is a single turnkey solution to install, manage and upgrade, eliminating the need to manage numerous point solutions to ensure data is protected and easy to recover. It even self-upgrades, so there is no time-consuming and resource-intensive pushing of agents or updates out to hundreds or thousands of remote-sites, servers and applications.

“With the cloud backup market continuing to climb and a growing number of solutions entering the market, users are confronted with an increasing number of options to choose from,” said Ashar Baig, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Asigra. “While cloud backup can provide major advantages customers can truly escalate their returns by selecting those solutions with features matched to their needs.”

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About Asigra
Asigra transforms the way businesses manage and protect their data by delivering market leading cloud backup solutions that seamlessly and efficiently manage, scale and deliver data protection services. Asigra Cloud Backup™ is built for new and existing MSPs/VARs who focus on data protection, IT constrained organizations, and industries with compliance mandates that are looking to improve their backup with a secure, reliable and predictable data protection cloud backup model. With 25 years of experience as backup/recovery pioneers, Asigra technology protects more than 250,000 sites globally ranging from the Global 100 to SMBs. Asigra manages one of the largest business-class backup service provider networks in the world who power their cloud backup services using Asigra technology. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.

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Agency Contact:
Joe Austin
Ventana PR
(818) 332-6166
joe.austin@ventanapr.com