Backup Products & Services

Backup Products & Services  A Look At Some Small Providers That Offer Big Functionality & Service

When we consider backup solutions for the enterprise, we tend to go for the tried-and-true products from big-name providers. But what about the smaller companies that offer products that often surpass our expectations? Here is a look at a few companies in the backup products and services market that deserve a first—and second—glance, what makes them unique, and what they have to offer the small to midsized enterprise.   CMS Products  Located in Costa Mesa, Calif., CMS Products (www.cmsproducts.com) manufactures automatic data backup and restore solutions and encrypted security solutions for portable and desktop computers. Other products in its lineup include media management solutions and software, high-capacity RAID arrays, data transfer products, and replacement hard drives. To date, the company has sold more than 2 million units of software.  Gary Streuter, vice president of marketing for CMS, says his company's backup and restore software, BounceBack Professional, is well-known for its user-friendly format and has allowed users to achieve quick and easy restoration of data otherwise lost to a hard drive failure. The software also allows users to make a complete bootable copy of a computer's hard drive, including the operating system, applications, system Registry, boot information, and all data files.  "BounceBack offers two forms of data rescue, namely removing the external drive from its enclosure [to replace] a crashed system drive or utilizing the rescue disk with a new bare-metal hard drive," Streuter explains. CMS' BounceBack Ultimate solution features a file-level encryption system with a new Instant PC Recovery, which Streuter says is unique within the industry.  CMS has also developed the ABSplus family of data backup and restore software, which ranges from lightweight, ruggedized portable hard drive solutions with massive storage capacities to robust, space-saving desktop solutions and sleek RAID backup solutions. The company has also forged its way into the realm of data transfer with its easy-to-use data transfer software and complete kits. The data transfer software utilizes CMS' EasyMove technology to make the migration of data from an old system drive to a new, larger bare-metal drive an easy task.  Streuter says data center and IT managers can benefit from CMS' enterprise-level products, which allow individual user monitoring for backups and complete customization to the data professional's needs.   Decho  Decho, located in Seattle, was formed when smaller companies Mozy and Pi joined together. Decho (www.decho.com) helps an enterprise protect and manage what the company calls its "digital echo," or its valuable digital information. Mozy, the company's flagship offering, is an online backup service for consumers and businesses. Mozy and MozyPro currently safeguard more than 10 petabytes of data, much of which comes from its more than 25,000 business customers.  Devin Knighton, spokesperson for Decho, says Mozy nearly doubled its user base in 2008. "The reason Mozy is growing so fast so quickly," Knighton says, "is because it's solving the backup problem for people and businesses in a simple, automatic, secure, and affordable way." He says Mozy frees up data center managers' time to focus on other assignments and allows them to manage the backups of servers, as well as employee desktops and laptops.  Knighton adds, "As a result, MozyPro protects a business' critical information assets from fire, flood, failure, or theft. According to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more due to a disaster [filed for bankruptcy within a year]."  Knighton says Mozy also has an option for IT shops to join its reseller program. He notes, "Today, Mozy has thousands of IT experts reselling the service in their local areas. By including Mozy in their offerings, IT experts enhance the value they provide to their clients." He concludes, "The only way to really solve the backup problem is to have backups occur automatically without even needing to push a button and to have a copy safely and securely stored away from the physical location of the primary copy."   Zmanda  Located in Sunnyvale, Calif., Zmanda (www.zmanda.com) provides open-source backup and recovery software. The company's three main solutions include Amanda Enterprise, ZRM (Zmanda Recovery Manager) for MySQL, and ZIB (Zmanda Internet Backup). These products are designed to back up and recover data in complex and heterogeneous IT environments.  Amanda Enterprise is Zmanda's enterprise-grade network backup solution based on the commercial version of Amanda, which was developed at the University of Maryland in 1991. ZRM for MySQL is a backup and recovery solution designed specifically for MySQL databases in mission-critical environments. And for small and medium-sized organizations, ZIB is an online backup and recovery solution that protects Windows files, applications, and networked devices.  So why should data center and IT managers at small to midsized enterprises be interested in Zmanda and its products? According to Chander Kant, chief executive officer at Zmanda, the most important asset for any company, regardless of size, is information. He elaborates, "The data protection issues that are associated with ensuring the availability and recoverability of information are a serious concern for all businesses, regardless of size."  Kant says because of the sheer amount of data that is created each day, it is difficult for enterprises to organize and manage it. He says information can be stored on a variety of storage devices, servers, endpoint machines, removable storage devices, and across vast networks of computers. He adds, "Some businesses lack the dedicated IT resources of the large enterprise. If a business has only one or two IT people, they are generally asked to manage a broad range of IT issues. Many organizations cannot afford the same types of commercial backup solutions that are used by larger enterprise customers." He says that fortunately for Zmanda, savvy organizations are helping to drive data protection innovation by demanding data protection solutions.  In Kant's opinion, Zmanda and its solutions are unique because none of the company's products use any proprietary data formats or tools when backing up data. He adds that other commercial backup products lock users in because they provide the only way to recover data using proprietary backup algorithms, tools, and data layouts. He says Zmanda is also unique because it is the only data protection solution provider to offer CDP (continuous data protection) for MySQL databases.  by Chris A. MacKinnon