Hard to believe but the first day of autumn is just two days away and with fall weather always comes cooler temperatures (which I happen to enjoy!) This means people are staying inside a little more and doing those fun, end of year activities that everyone enjoys – such as planning their 2019 budgets. As you do so, solutions from BackupAssist and StorMagic are two hot new technologies for companies to consider making room for in the New Year.
BackupAssist 365.
BackupAssist 365 backs up files and emails stored in the cloud. While backup of cloud-based data may seem rather ho-hum in today’s artificial intelligent, block chain obsessed, digital transformation focused world, it solves a real world that nearly every size organization faces: how to cost-effectively and simply protect all those pesky files and emails that people store in cloud applications such as DropBox, Office 365, Google Drive, OneDrive, Gmail, Outlook and others.
To do so, BackupAssist 365 adopted two innovative yet practical approaches to protect files and emails.
- First, it interfaces directly with these various cloud providers to backup this data. Using your login permissions (which you provide when configuring the software,) BackupAssist 365 accesses data directly in the cloud. This negates the need for your server, PC, or laptop to be turned on when these backups occur so backups can occur at any time.
- Second, it does cloud-to-local In other words, rather than running up more data transfer and network costs that come with backing up to another cloud, it backs the data backup to local storage on your site. While that may seem a little odd in today’s cloud-centric world, companies can get a great deal of storage capacity for nominal amounts of money. Since it only does an initial full backup and then differential backups thereafter, the ongoing data transfer costs are nominal and the amount of storage capacity that one should need onsite equally small.
Perhaps the best part about BackupAssist 365 is its cost (or lack thereof.) BackupAssist 365 licenses its software on a per user basis with each user email account counting as one user license. However, this one email account covers the backup of that user’s data in any cloud service used by that user. Further, the cost is only $1/month per user with a decreasing cost for greater number of users. In fact, the cost is so low on a per user basis, companies may not even need to budget for this service. They can just start using it and expense their credit cards to keep it below corporate radar screens.
StorMagic SvSAN
The StorMagic SvSAN touches on another two hot technology trends that I purposefully (or not so purposefully) left out above: hyperconverged infrastructure or HCI and edge computing. However, unlike many of the HCI and edge computing plays in the marketplace such as Cisco HyperFlex, Dell EMC VxRail, and Nutanix, StorMagic has not forgotten about cost constraints that branch, remote, and small offices face.
As Cisco, Dell EMC, Nutanix and others chase the large enterprise data center opportunities, they often leave remote, branch, and small offices with two choices: pay up or find another solution. Many of these size offices are opting to find alternative solutions.
This is where StorMagic primarily plays. For a less well-known player, they play much bigger than they may first appear. Through partnerships with large providers such as Cisco and Lenovo among others, StorMagic comes to market with highly available, two-server systems that scale across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of remote sites. To get a sense of StorMagic’s scalability, walk into any of the 2,000+ Home Depots in the United States or Mexico and ask to look at the computer system that hosts their compute and storage. If the Home Depot lets you and you can find it, you will find a StorMagic system running somewhere in the store.
The other big challenge that each StorMagic system also addresses is security. Because their systems can be deployed almost anywhere in any environment, it does make them susceptible to theft. In fact, in talking to one of its representatives, he shared a story where someone drove a forklift through the side of a building and stole a computer system at one of its customer sites. Not that it mattered. To counter these types of threats, StorMagic encrypts all the data on its HCI solutions with its own software that is FIPS 140-2 compliant.
Best of all, to get these capabilities, companies do not have to break the bank to acquire one of these systems. The list price for the Standard Edition of the SvSAN software, which includes 2TB of usable storage, high availability, and remote management, is $2,500.
As companies look ahead and plan their 2019 budgets, they need to take care of their operational requirements but they may also want to dip their toes in the water to get the latest and greatest technologies. These two technologies give companies the opportunities to do both. Using BackupAssist 365, companies can quickly and easily address their pesky cloud file and email backup challenges while StorMagic gives them the opportunity to affordably and safely explore the HCI and edge computing waters.