Online Backup and Recovery Goes Virtual

October 2, 2007 Dan Burger

Ensuring business uptime through business continuity is one of the top priorities for many businesses. Productivity is directly related to the ability (or inability) to access data. Because of increasing emphasis on data protection and data availability, we’ve also witnessed a growth in licensed software and managed services related to this environment. One company that is developing online backup and recovery software for the iSeries installed base is EVault, which this week announced enhancements to its disaster recovery platform for physical and virtual environments.

EVault brought online back ups and recoveries to the IT industry in 1997 and came into the iSeries market in 2004. The company, which is now owned by Seagate, provides backup via the Internet in eight geographically dispersed data centers, and also offers software to companies that prefer keeping their data in-house. Either option can be used to replace tape-drive backup.

The support for VMware infrastructures in EVault’s Unified Recovery platform, which includes both the software and the services options, enables real-time disaster recovery protection of VMware virtual machine environments, including all major operating systems, applications and files. This could be important to System i shops with externally attached System x and BladeCenter servers. Also new in the Unified Recovery platform, which is based on EVault’s InfoStage version 6 software, are the capabilities to do hot backups and granular document-level recovery for Microsoft SharePoint servers.

In addition to offering a recovery platform for physical and virtual environments, EVault has also added WAN optimization and data reduction at the source, as well as data deduplication at the target. The data deduplication is credited with eliminating redundant blocks of data within backup jobs held in storage, thereby increasing storage resources without compromising performance, scalability, or requiring an appliance.

Optional agents and plug-ins now available include replication of the primary backup site to an alternate disaster recovery location and enabling remote offices to create a local backup vault for improved backup and recovery times at local area network speeds, while also automatically replicating data to a centralized disaster recovery site.

As a convenience, the new browser-based dashboard provides a single point of management for data centers and remote offices. This should help simplify setup and facilitate service level agreements (SLAs).

“Limited resources, complex IT environments and hyper data growth are constants no matter what size the business,” says Richard Heitmann, vice president, product management at EVault. “The EVault Unified Recovery platform allows companies to focus on their core business, while not having to worry if their data is protected.”

Software (InfoStage 6) pricing, for companies that want to manage and store data in-house, begins at less than $10,000. Additional agents and plug-ins are sold at $600 per agent and between $795 and $995 per plug-in. Software as a service (SaaS) pricing is based on a per GB per month model. Also factoring into the SaaS pricing is the amount of data, length of retentions, and length of contract. The company claims a small business can get its data protected and offsite for less than $40 per month.