Wheelings & Dealings: Persistent Systems Finally Snags Dell Deal

Persistence pays off as yesterday Persistent Systems announced a partnership with Dell that revolves around AppAssure, storage technology the server giant bought in 2012.

AppAssure itself was founded in 2006 as a backup maker, and two years later got a major investment from Bain Capital Ventures. Today the technology is simply known as Dell AppAssure.

Meanwhile Persistent Systems provides a disaster recovery solution based on the cloud called rCloud.

“With this partnership, we are able to extend Dell AppAssure's proven on-site backup and recovery solutions with our powerful cloud based disaster recovery service as a single, robust and easy to implement and fully cloud-enabled business continuity solution,” said Nara Rajagopalan, Chief Product Officer, Persistent Systems, Inc. “Our integrated offering means customers aren’t required to rip and replace their existing infrastructure, they can simply build on top of it – a huge savings in time and money.”

One sales approach is to offer DR as an added value to existing AppAssure customers.

The duo’s DR system can work with on-premises gear or cloud storage, and the pair claims the recovery is essentially instantaneous. What this means is the DR is really driven by a form of failover so the customer can swap over to a complete and current replica of the backup.

In fact, Persistent Systems’ rCloud 4 Universal Architecture with Instant Restore has a proprietary approach to uploading data changes to the Persistent rCloud data center. Like Datto and other backup providers, the data is stored as virtual disks. When a system goes down, these virtual disks can simply be booted, as they contain not just the data, but the environment that surrounds it.

Dell is pumped about the new partnership.

“Combining Dell AppAssure’s key software and hardware capabilities with rCloud 4 services from Persistent Systems enables us to deliver intuitive and channel-friendly support for image based backup and disaster recovery services in the cloud today,” said Todd Fredrick, Executive Director - Dell AppAssure.

The pair should find a ready market. MarketsandMarkets indicates that the cloud storage market will, on a CAGR basis, grow 40 percent hitting $46.8 billion by 2018. Meanwhile Gartner says that this year, some one third of medium-sized shops will do disaster recovery in the cloud, up from just 1 percent three years ago.