Category: Asigra Inc

VMware comes with more than its fair share of “gotchas” for the uninitiated and software licensing costs for VMware VMs are one “gotcha” that may sneak up on unsuspecting companies. Asigra Televaulting’s capacity-based licensing model that is based on the size of the backup data store after it is globally deduplicated doesn’t really get any better from a cost and management perspective. Since backup software is typically viewed as an expense by companies anyway, this licensing model ensures all data remains protected while adding minimal costs to the corporate bottom line.

Asigra Televaulting’s key value proposition is that it does not require administrators to install an agent on each VM. This is especially important in the new virtual world. Using Asigra Televaulting, its DS-Client automatically discovers all of the VMs on a VMware server. Once detected, the DS-Client displays the complete VMware installation tree (the physical server, the virtual machine/templates and each VM’s directories and files) to the administrator.

Companies have a love-hate relationship with VMware. What companies are coming to realize is that introducing VMware into their environment needs to change their entire paradigm of how they manage servers – from the applications running on them to the data they protect. In the case of data protection, the change is even more extreme. Enterprise companies can not and should not expect their existing version of backup to work well in this new virtual world as it was designed to work from a totally different premise. This new data protection paradigm is what Asigra’s Televaulting is designed to address.

CDP and deduplication are now on the forefront of the minds of more enterprise managers as they contemplate how to best introduce disk-based data protection into their backup environment. Contributing to the difficulty in selecting one of these technologies is that they address different data protection needs: CDP provides shorter application recovery time and point objectives while deduplication reduces disk data storage requirements. To better understand how Asigra’s Televaulting delivers on these features in an agentless fashion, I spoke with Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer Consulting.

To say that enterprise end-users have, over the years, become jaded to vendor claims that their products can protect heterogeneous environments is an understatement. Supporting the mix of Windows, Netware, Linux, Unix and VMware operating system platforms found in most enterprise environments is not a trivial task. So when Asigra promises that its Televaulting software can meet these enterprise requirements using its agentless architecture, the end-user skepticism barometer in me climbs a couple of notches.

In companies with only a few TBs of data and a limited number of operating systems, applications and platforms, the value proposition of Asigra’s Televaulting agentless backup and recovery software is known entity. The little publicized fact is that Asigra already protects hundreds of TBs of data on hundreds of servers with multiple operating systems and applications.