The rise of VMware gave birth to a whole new class of storage vendors with products specifically designed for virtual environments. The idea behind companies such as Veeam is that traditional backup tools were designed to protect physical, not virtual machines, and making them do the latter was a kludge at best.
The next wave in this area is to have purpose-built VM backup, but deploy it in the cloud. This way you are using virtual technology to backup virtual machines.
TwinStrata knows cloud backup the way I know my way around Logan Airport – we’ve both been there about a million times.
TwinStrata’s main tool is CloudArray, which now comes in the form of CloudArray Disaster Recovery as a Service (CloudArray DRaaS).
This is actually a new piece to CloudArray “that delivers seamless disaster recovery (DR) for VMware users on-demand without requiring continuous investment in secondary infrastructure or sites,” the company said.
TwinStrata looked at the disaster recovery market for VMware and found it wanting, at least as far as the cloud is concerned. “Cloud-based DR alternatives for VMware environments have been limited by incompatibility and difficult administration, often requiring third-party conversion, migration and/or backup tools,” the company argued.
TwinStrata decided to correct these flaws. “Before this service, we found that 'cloud DR' options were not particularly viable for fully virtualized IT environments, and those few that were integrated for VMware came at prohibitively high costs,” said Nicos Vekiarides , CEO of TwinStrata. “Our cloud disaster recovery service enables VMware users to recovery data and applications seamlessly at a fraction of the cost, making disaster recovery, business continuity and compliance with recovery objectives and regulations attainable for nearly any organization.”
One customer is already on board. “Today, we use a combination of TwinStrata, cloud storage and an always-on cloud compute environment to drive our disaster recovery strategy,” said Vernon Jackson, senior systems engineer, SEPA Laboratories. “While it works well, it's pretty costly to keep secondary infrastructure up and running in the cloud just so we can run DR tests once a quarter. With this new CloudArray DRaaS offering, we can eliminate eight months worth of cloud compute costs, while still maintaining a quarterly DR test schedule.”
IDC analyst Dan Iacono sees value in the TwinStrata play. “IT organizations are moving to the cloud to gain agility, reduce IT costs, and increase both service and utilization while taking advantage of the cloud's pay-for-what-you-use model,” said Iacono, Cloud Storage Systems, IDC. “TwinStrata's DRaaS can help IT organizations realize those cloud benefits, and it can also help enable an improved disaster recovery strategy, while providing flexibility and cloud choice.”
Check out these TMC TwinStrata videos:
Last year at Cloud Expo, TMC also talked to TwinStrata about its cloud approach.
One mantra of TwinStrata is to give customers choice. “What we do is help companies expand their storage capacity using a choice of cloud providers,” TwinStrata’s Vekiarides told MSPToday at Cloud Expo East 2012. “We really help them address the need for growing data, whether it’s backup, archive, data replication or even storing some of their primary data elsewhere other than on premise. We enable tremendous cost savings and give them a way to store data that requires virtually no maintenance.”
The cloud is on the rise in response to new technology and fresh IT budget pressure. “The most important thing that we are seeing is that the cost of maintaining IT infrastructure for most organizations is very high,” Vekiarides said. “About 70 percent of IT costs go into maintaining existing infrastructures and what businesses really want to do is provide better services to their customers. But, if only 30 percent of IT dollars can go to this, how can they do that when they spend all of their time and money maintaining existing infrastructure?”
Cloud services means IT can focus in business specific tasks, while the cloud takes care of the rest. “Cloud storage pushes all of that to the cloud provider,” he added. “For example, provisioning, data storage and daily backups can become automated and easier without any manual intervention. All of the operations contribute to the high maintenance burden, but with cloud we really take that away. We offload that from the administrator.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
