Can we make remote online backup work?

This month we have a lot of exciting news. However, I wanted to focus on our announcement to partner with CompuVault for remote online data backup. As many of you that have been with us for a while may already know, this will be our fourth partnership with a remote online data backup company. The first solution turned out to be too client-focused and the company ended up having financial problems. The second product was offered as an add-on to Silverback, and while based on the robust Asigra platform, was too immature for the market. The third solution that we dealt with was Digisense, which had a great product but unfortunately the company's leadership left shortly after we partnered with them and last fall they effectively went out of business.

At this point you may be asking yourself, why even try again? Believe me, I asked myself that question a lot as well. The truth of the matter though is that our customers really need a solid remote online data backup solution. I think that it is safe to say that we all understand the pain involved with a tape-based model. Not to mention the fact that the amounts of data we are backing up these days are making tapes obsolete even if their management were easier. We have been doing disk-disk backups for some years now leveraging NAS appliances. With these solutions you solve the daily management and the speed and size issues, but to get the data offsite you need to manually backup to a USB drive or some other device and your customers risk losing days of data if their building should have a disaster. So the reality is that our only real solution is to find a solid remote online data backup offering. I am happy to say that we have found such a solution in the CompuVault offering.

I have actually been talking with CompuVault for over a year now. I can tell you that with so many misfires under my belt I was not about to announce a partnership with a company until we were absolutely sure of two critical components: 1. The company is not going out of business anytime soon, and 2. The solution is rock solid.

While CompuVault has only been in business for a few years, they come from a solid and stable background-their sister company CompuNite has been in business for over 20 years. I wanted to make sure that they could actually deliver so I took a trip to New Jersey last March and met with CEO Steven Ferman and COO Jeff Cox, as well as the rest of their staff. They shared their business plan with me and we worked on many details of our partnership. After this meeting I met with Jason Casey, their CTO, and toured their data center. Needless to say I was very impressed with all that I saw.

As for the technology, I had a few main requirements that the solution must have:

1. Ability to perform a local backup and restore
2. Centralized management of all devices on the network
3. Automatic backups to both a local device as well as the online vault
4. Ability to restore directly from the online vault
5. Ability to restore to a virtual server for quick recovery
6. Message-level backups of Exchange mailboxes
7. Block-level backups vs. image-based backups
8. Must be integrated with our monitoring solution (Level Platforms)

These may seem like odd requirements, but I can tell you that not very many of the solutions out there meet all of these. In fact, when we first started talking with CompuVault they did not have integration with Level Platforms that met our requirements. This was our first test of their commitment and I can tell you they passed with flying colors. They worked with the Level Platforms development team and addressed all of our requirements.