The cloud backup market is more crowded than a Texas cattle drive, and now there is one more cow.
One Source Networks (OSN) is a new entrant into the world of cloud backup, or as they call it Backup as a Service (BaaS). One Source is already an MSP and cloud provider and adding backup is a natural progression.
The OSN offering, like the tens of dozens of others in the market, offers a complete backup service that protects applications, files, and even handles tape backups – for those that continue to live in the storage past.
Stating the obvious, the top exec at OSN explained that data is indeed increasing. “Data is growing exponentially-not just in volume, but in the critical role it plays in the enterprise every day,” said Gina Nomellini, CMO of One Source Networks. "We have developed our Backup-as-a-Service offering to provide customers with peace of mind by ensuring that their business-critical information is always protected and easily accessible.”
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Those statements speak to the commodity nature of cloud backup. To stand out from the burgeoning crowd, you’d better be super cheap or offer features no one else can match.
For OSN this means having a broad array of offerings which include pure Internet backups and hybrid where the initial backup is on-site.
For large backup jobs, OSN will provision a dedicated connection to speed things along.
As part of the hybrid approach, OSN makes backups from disk to off-site tape. This works well in many cases, but tape backup comes with a litany of problems, and here it seems that OSN is going backwards.
The key partner in all this is CommVault and its Simpana software. Simpana is an overall data protection and management platform, and backup is just one of its functions. On the storage front, Simpana does “hardware snapshots, indexing, global deduplication, replication, search, and reporting, all within a single platform,” CommVault said. “From a single, centralized management console, you can automate global protection and retention policies while secure, self-service access enhances availability of information and reduces help desk requests. Simpana software extends beyond just better backup and recovery to improving your workforce productivity and business efficiency.”
CommVault has been in the storage game a good long while and its tools are highly mature. With Simpana its claims backups succeed 95 percent of the time and to cut costs basically in half.
And the tool claims to get rid of some 90 percent of redundant data, which should dramatically increase efficiency and reduce storage loads. This all should cut back up time in half.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
