Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Another backup vendor you may not have heard of

September 23, 2010 -- A few weeks ago I blogged about a backup software vendor that I had never heard of, despite the fact that they've been shipping product for more than four years. That was Cofio Software (see "A backup vendor you haven't heard of").

Afterwards I heard from a lot of data protection vendors wondering if I had ever heard of them (presumably because I hadn't written about them). I was aware of most of them, but one exception was AppAssure, which has been shipping its flagship Replay software suite since 2007.

If you're open to considering backup vendors outside of the Big Four (and given the relatively high readership of that Cofio post, many of you are), AppAssure is worth consideration.

Many of the company's executives hail from Symantec/Veritas (and AppAssure says that about 75% of its customers are former Backup Exec users) with some execs tracing their roots back to W Quinn Associates (which was acquired by Precise Software which was acquired by Veritas which was acquired by Symantec).

AppAssure claims 13 consecutive quarters of growth, and as of last month the company had exceeded its total 2009 revenues (which grew 268% over 2008 revenues), according to Steven Toole, AppAssure's chief marketing officer. The company also claims that Replay has accounted for more than 56 million backups on five petabytes+ of data.

The application-aware Replay4 software backs up the entire application stack, including app objects, files, operating systems and blocks with "near" continuous data protection (snapshots every 15 minutes).

The suite includes standard functionality such as backup and recovery, disaster recovery and cloud recovery, as well as all the specific features you might need in a data protection suite, including the elimination of backup windows, off-host processing, data deduplication and compression, VM failover, bare metal restore, corruption detection, virtualization, replication, fast backups (8GB/minute), etc.

And most of those features are bundled in what appears to be attractive pricing (exceptions include replication and virtualization, which are priced separately). For example, the base price is $899 per protected server, and that's for a perpetual (non-recurring) license. Specific pricing: $2,099 per VMware host with an unlimited number of guests, $1,499 for Hyper-V, $1,499 for SQL Server, and $2,099 for Exchange.

If that sounds intriguing, check out AppAssure's web site where you can get a free trial version of Replay.

3 comments:

onQCliff said...

One more the "haven't heard of" list: QuorumLabs onQ...but this one is a bit different. Instead of working like conventional backup, it maintains a ready-to-run virtual copy of an entire SMB data center on a pair of appliances (one on site, one off site). It integrates this capability with state-of-the-art deduplicated snapshotting for point-in-time file recovery. Check it out.

Unknown said...

This sounds like an interesting vendor. We have been recently looking for a cloud disaster recovery service for our business. We keep hearing of all these businesses losing their data because of a storm so we are trying to take the next step to hopefully not let that happen to us. Thanks so much for your post, it was very interesting to read.

kiwi Goldstein said...

hi,

Good factors described on the cloud disaster and its vendor. Yes, the main factor is the difference of quite pricing and almost helpful in generating the details. The suite includes standard functionality such as backup and recovery, disaster recovery and cloud recovery, as well as all the specific features you might need in a data protection suite, including the elimination of backup windows, off-host processing, data deduplication and compression. Good comment added.