New Hybrid Cloud DR Services Target SMBs
Business continuity has long been an afterthought for many small and mid-sized enterprises. Even those that do run backup and recovery software on their networks don't have a setup that allows them to recover from a disabling disaster at a given location.
The cloud is making it easier for companies of all sizes to establish disaster recovery plans without the cost and complexity associated with it. And just about every supplier of backup and recovery software is offering services to enable customers to use the cloud to store their data.
Two companies, Axcient and KineticD, last week launched hybrid cloud-based solutions and services aimed at making it easier for small and medium businesses to backup and recover data.
Axcient is taking a unique approach to backup and recovery. The Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor's Axcient Cloud Continuity is a service that lets organizations back up data and apps running on PCs and servers, and gain virtual access via the Web in the event a site goes down.
The hybrid cloud platform allows organizations to back up all of the applications, files and folders running on PCs, as well as on servers. Rather than installing software on every device, an appliance developed by Hewlett-Packard extracts images from systems using Active Directory APIs.
When a customer site has an outage, users can access their data and applications, including Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint as well as any other business apps running on a company's network. Users can log in to the Axcient service from any location, launch their virtual office and gain VPN access to all their apps and data, said Axcient's CEO Jason Moore. "We don't just focus on the data, we focus on the applications, and that's a huge difference," Moore said.
Meanwhile, KineticD's new KineticCloud for Servers is also a hybrid cloud offering that allows SMBs and branch offices of larger organizations to back up data locally to a server or upload those backups to the cloud. The service carries a monthly cost of $19.95 per network and 50 cents per gigabyte.
It uses data de-duplication on the servers, a process of only backing up data that has changed, providing much faster backup times. "The idea is you sync to the cloud and have a full backup," said Jamie Brenzel, KineticD's CEO.
KineticD's new offering was made possible thanks to its acquisition of ROBOBAK earlier this year. That company's agentless disk-to-disk backup solution is delivered to customers via managed services providers. Slated for release early next year, the new offering is now available for beta testing.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/02/2011 at 1:14 PM