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Asigra Utilizes Grid In Distributed Backup Solution

Asigra announced Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises, a distributed backup solution that delivers centralized backup administration of remote site data islands, while providing a new and unique pricing model that enables IT organizations to dramatically reduce the cost and management of backup across the WAN.

Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises was developed with a distributed backup software architecture and capacity-based pricing model ­- a first in the industry ­- that eliminates the data protection, performance, scalability and high license costs inherent in conventional tape-based backup software and agent-based licenses from Veritas, Legato/EMC and others.

"The traditional tape backup model was designed to protect information inside a corporate data center and it works well within that limitation; however, today's distributed enterprises need a data protection solution that eliminates the technological limitations and outrageous agent-based licensing costs of stretching a single-site backup architecture into a multi-site environment," said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. "Asigra addresses this requirement by giving IT managers the best of both worlds: much lower operational costs with dramatically improved end-user service levels."

By adopting a capacity-based licensing model, Asigra eliminates the fees and management costs involved in installing and managing agents, dramatically reducing the cost of enterprise backup. Asigra Televaulting enables backup and recovery for distributed data as a utility service within an enterprise, and includes all the functions, budgetary controls, chargeback billing system, features and tools required. With Asigra software, the corporate IT department can effectively become an internal service provider, and charge internal departments for capacity consumed so that IT becomes a Oprofit center instead of a Ocost center.

Asigra combines the utility service provisioning approach with a disk-based agentless architecture to shatter the limitations of traditional distributed-backup technologies. Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises requires just one free software application to be installed on a Windows or Linux machine at each remote location. The Asigra customer pays only for the aggregate amount of compressed data across the enterprise network.

"The combination of agentless software and disk-based backup across a WAN attacks both the 'hard' and 'soft' costs associated with conventional tape backup, including software license fees, media and drive maintenance, offsite storage, and the staffing required to perform tape-based backup," said W. Curtis Preston, vice president of service development for Glasshouse Technologies. "Organizations looking to lower software expenses should consider Asigra when evaluating data protection technologies for the distributed enterprise."

For organizations with medium to large geographically dispersed environments comprised of dozens of distributed sites, the backup load of hundreds of thousands or millions of files transmitting into a centralized backup server has the potential to choke conventional backup solutions. Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises is architected with Grid-based performance and capacity scaling for virtually unlimited data growth, allowing the software to support any backup load.

Asigra allows organizations to deploy distributed backup without changing their existing data center backup infrastructure. At each remote site an Asigra Televaulting DS-Client discovers all servers, desktops and laptops connected to the local network and automates the backup of all local data assets. Before the backup data set is transmitted to the corporate data center, Asigra Televaulting software analyzes the data, finds new and changed file blocks, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible. The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an IP-WAN connection to a centralized Asigra Televaulting DS-System server located in the corporate data center, which consolidates backup data from all distributed sites. That DS-System server is then protected just like any other server within the data center as part of the organization's ongoing data protection policies. Moreover, the back-end DS-System server integrates directly with third-party ILM solutions from the major storage vendors.

Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises supports a broad range of platforms found in remote sites, including Windows, Linux, Unix, Novell and AS/400, and protects Oracle, SQL Server and Exchange Server data. Back-end DS-System software runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows.