Asigra Inc. has been doing backup and recovery in the cloud since 1986, before we even called the cloud the cloud. Back then, it was just the Internet or private WAN networks leading to service provider data centers.
Asigra is all about MSP partners and its MSP partners are all about customers. This chain leads us from Asigra to MSP partner Echopath to customer PacMoore, which does contract manufacturing.
PacMoore, like most modern shops, has virtual and physical computing infrastructure. Before Echopath and Asigra, this all was backed up by tape. Tape was a breakthrough in the early days of backup, but it is clearly showing its age. Tape takes a long time to recover, requires frequent manual intervention and has a failure rate that makes a Yugo look good.
The Asigra solution is to replace tape with the cloud. There is less management, far faster recovery, and far greater chance that the recovery will perform without a hitch.
Asigra claims it stands out from the cloud backup pack “by being the first and only enterprise-class backup solution to backup all enterprise data into a single consolidated repository eliminating islands of data,” the company argues.
The latest tool is Asigra Cloud Backup v12. This software doesn’t just backup on-premises apps and systems, but also uses the cloud to backup the cloud, protecting both SaaS and PaaS data, as well as VMware-based systems.
Leading the PacMoore
PackMoore serves food industry clients such as Kraft and General Mills with a smorgasbord of products, including packaging and manufacturing on a contract basis.
All this business was stretching the tape backup system to the breaking point as production data reached 20 TB and the environment added more and more virtual machines based on Xen.
The answer was Echopath’s data recovery service based on Asigra, which now backs up ERP data as well as Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange. Plus end user machines also get the Asigra touch.
“When we initially started looking for alternatives to tape backup, we looked at Echopath,” said Scott Reid, VP of operations for PacMoore. “They presented us with a solution that would eliminate the hassle of cataloging and sending backup tapes offsite and retrieving them for lengthy data recovery processes. With the service now fully deployed and several successful recoveries under our belt, the Asigra-based solution has given us the assurance of knowing our data is always accessible.”
Reid sees tape winding down. “Tape is no longer a viable option given other alternatives now available in the marketplace. Cloud-based data recovery is so much easier than having to find, load and retrieve data from tapes,” Reid said. “Thanks to Echopath and Asigra, we have shaved off the number of hours spent on backup significantly and substantially improved our ability to recover from a data loss event regardless of where the data was originally located.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
