Asigra – All-in-One-Backup – From the Enterprise to the Cloud

Protecting data is becoming increasingly complex and fraught with risk. Today, business data resides on everything from centralized, virtualized server infrastructure to public cloud software applications, to end user mobile edge devices. Finding a way to reliably and efficiently protect this information is essential towards keeping costs down and simplifying the data recovery process.

With their 27 years of experience in enterprise data center protection, Asigra has developed a comprehensive end-to-end backup solution to protect data wherever it lives. And now through their Recovery License Model (RLM), organizations can protect their information even more affordably.

Agentless Backup is Secure

Asigra’s backup offering is an agentless backup solution which can be deployed to protect information across the enterprise and in the cloud. Their architecture consists of a DS-System and a DS-Client. The DS-System is a centralized 64-bit, Windows or Linux server that utilizes a disk (NAS, SAN) backup repository for storing all the backup data. It can be configured in an N+1 configuration for high availability (HA) and to scale performance. Furthermore, DS-Systems can be distributed across multiple, geographically dispersed data centers and through replication, provide enhanced DR resiliency.

Despite the name, the DS-Client does not require an agent to be installed on each machine that requires data protection. In fact, the DS-Client is an agentless software architecture that can discover physical as well as virtual machines and servers on the LAN and backup the data accordingly. The DS-Client can be deployed on dedicated physical servers or as a virtual machine instance. One DS-Client is capable of supporting multiple physical or virtual servers and like its DS-System counterpart, it can be scaled to meet performance and redundancy objectives.

As an example, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) providing a backup service, would  install the DS-Client at the customer site and the backup data would be moved across the network to the DS-System at the MSP data center facility, for offsite data protection.

When deployed in a grid configuration, DS-Clients can provide high performance and redundancy. For example, if a DS-Client fails, one of its peers within the physical server or hypervisor grid will seamlessly assume its backup workloads and continue the backup cycle. These are key capabilities for enterprise data centers and particularly MSPs that need to provide a reliable backup service in multi-tenant environments.

Granular Backup and Recovery

Upon initial deployment, the DS-Client is configured to perform discovery of servers, desktops, laptops and other endpoint devices on the network and enables the backup administrator to pick and choose the specific data repositories (C drive, filesystem, etc.) for scheduled backup protection. The DS-Client will then perform a full backup on all applications, operating systems and devices configured.

Every subsequent backup thereafter is a block-level, incremental backup, whereby only the changed data blocks are copied to the data vault. For example, if a single slide changes in a 5MB PowerPoint presentation, Asigra will only backup the block of data for the new slide rather than pushing the entire 5MB file back over the network to the data vault.

In addition to virtual machine support (VM) for VMware, Hyper-V, Xen-Source, Parallels and Virtual Iron, DS-Clients can be installed on user desktops, laptops and edge devices like iPADs and mobile phones, to provide complete end-to-end data protection.

When remote edge devices connect to the WAN via an Internet connection, the network is automatically detected by the DS-Client. Any new data from the prior backup will then be deduplicated at the source, compressed, encrypted and pushed over the network to the DS-System vault for protection. If the network connection is limited, the DS-Client can utilize bandwidth throttling to only consume a small percentage of the bandwidth. Likewise, if a large amount of new data has to be backed up, the DS-Client can be optionally configured to only consume a small amount of CPU; so as to not disrupt end user quality of service. Typically, only a fraction of data is sent from the device to the central data center and there is little to no performance disruption to the user.

In addition to providing savings in the amount of disk capacity required to store backup data, Asigra’s source-side deduplication and compression enable remote offices with limited bandwidth links to transmit backup information in a timelier manner. This is especially important for MSPs that need a way to backup customer data without requiring their clients to invest in additional network infrastructure.

Data Lockdown

Data security has taken on a whole new dimension in light of recent world events. As businesses increasingly look toward adopting cloud technologies, secure data encryption is becoming a must-have. Asigra employs highly secure NIST FIPS-140-2 data encryption to data in flight and at rest to ensure the secure transport and management of sensitive business information.

Asigra’s unique autonomic healing and restore validation features provide self-healing attributes along with efficient storage and reliable restoration of backed up data. As a result, MSPs are able to provide a highly reliable backup and recovery service for enterprises that can securely and efficiently store and recover backed up information.

Archiving the Archive

All backup is not created equal, yet many backup technologies store all backup data as though it has the same relative business value. For instance, data backed up in the past 24 hours has a much higher chance of being accessed than data that was backed up 60 days ago. Consequently, critical backup information is more deserving of a higher performing, higher value disk storage asset than say stale data that is rarely, if ever, accessed.

Asigra’s Backup Lifecycle Manager (BLM) enables storage planners to segregate backup data based on its business value. Recent data backups that are required to support business continuity may be stored on a Tier-2 or Tier-3 disk storage array, for example, while “cold” data that has not been accessed in 90 days, can be archived off to inexpensive disk or even public cloud storage.

BLM is a way to lower the backup total cost of ownership by moving data from higher cost assets to lower cost assets while helping to ensure that active backup storage repositories do not become bloated and difficult to manage.

Cloud-to-Cloud Backup

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Office 365 are increasingly being utilized by businesses of all sizes. While SaaS applications provide a lot of value, there is one big downside – loss of data control. Typically there are no data restoration service levels when using these applications. If an end user accidentally deletes critical business information, for example, it could take days or even weeks for the data to be restored by the provider. And even a single, relatively small data restore request could cost big bucks.

Asigra allows businesses to enjoy all the benefits of SaaS cloud computing while still maintaining control of their data. Asigra nimbly backs up data in cloud provider infrastructure and moves it to the customer cloud environment for safekeeping. Restoring data back into Salesforce.com or Google Apps can be accomplished with a few simple mouse clicks.

Recovery License Model

20 years ago, Asigra was the first to introduce to the backup market “capacity-based” backup software licensing. Due to the massive proliferation of business data, however, capacity-based licenses have become inherently unfair. In most environments, less than 10% of all the backup data under management is accessed for recoveries. When equated with the insurance policy model, this means that end users are overpaying by 90%!

In order to enable businesses to “right-size” their backup licensing costs, Asigra has introduced their Recovery License Model (RLM). As Storage Switzerland covered in a recent webinar, Asigra’s RLM is designed to save businesses up to 40% over what they currently pay for capacity based software licensing. Simply put, through the RLM pricing model, organizations only pay for the data they recover.

What’s more, with their Recovery Tracker Tool, data center planners can analyze what data sets are being recovered more frequently and determine the appropriate corrective actions to ensure the need for fewer recoveries – hence improving application service level agreements (SLAs) and further lowering their recovery licensing costs.

Conclusion

The proliferation of data across the enterprise, on edge devices and into the cloud, has created formidable data protection challenges for businesses of all sizes. The backup software market space literally has dozens of players offering solutions which provide good functionality for certain segments of business infrastructure, but rarely are they comprehensive enough to cover the full range of today’s data center and remote end user data protection needs. Compounding this problem is the escalating costs of just doing backup as usual – as data grows, so do the licensing costs associated with protecting this information.

Asigra is unique in that as a 27-year industry veteran, they continue to re-invent their backup offering while sticking to their core ethos – simplified data protection at a fair price. With their ability to agentlessly protect core data center infrastructure, cloud applications and edge devices all from the same architecture, Asigra stands out as a mainstay of the industry.

Asigra is a client of Storage Switzerland

About Colm Keegan

As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.