Asigra and ONStor Combine For Compliance

Data is being generated at an incredibly rapid rate by organisations of all sizes. Over the last few years much of this data has become subject to a raft of regulatory and compliance requirements concerning its storage, protection and the speed with which it needs to be restored. There are many vendors active in the storage management arena and last week two of them combined to provide a very interesting enterprise backup and recovery offer designed to simplify the protection of information at remote sites.

Data protection is a significant concern within data centres where the administration of very large volumes of information is both time consuming and expensive. However, for organisations with data being generated and stored at remote locations, data protection becomes highly problematic, especially as such sites often have little, if any, dedicated skilled IT staff available locally. It is to help with this challenge that Asigra and ONStor Inc. have combined.

Asigra is known for supplying software that provides sophisticated, agentless distributed backup and recovery capabilities. Indeed, the Asigra Televaulting software can help safeguard data held on a wide range of servers, desktops and laptop systems. The software also handles some of the security issues surrounding data protection by being able to encrypt data ‘in-flight’ and ‘at rest’.

ONStor is a specialist company building NAS (Network Attached Storage) gateways to simplify access to and ‘pool’ information held on a variety of heterogeneous storage platforms. It is fair to say that ONStor’s Bobcat NAS gateways, coupled with its dedicated software, provide one of the most flexible, performant and scaleable networked storage platforms available today.

Combining Asigra Televaulting, software specifically designed to handle multi-site backup and recovery, with ONStor Bobcat NAS gateways allows storage consolidation and management to be optimised and managed effectively by building a centralised data vault. Licensing is handled not using a “per client (server, desktop or laptop)” but utilising a “compressed data capacity” model.

As with all consolidation efforts, this approach clearly allows hardware and software costs to be minimised. Of much greater importance is that this system is inherently much more manageable and can significantly reduce or eliminate the need for remote sites to handle backup and recovery operations, usually thereby enhancing overall data protection.

The combined Asigra / ONStor bundle will be sold by a number of channel partners in both Europe and the United States. UK entry level solution pricing is expected to start around £21,000.

The combination of two very sound, very sophisticated tools in a single bundle is to be praised. Indeed, the combination of these offerings from ONStor and Asigra makes sense and gives the two vendors a package about which they can shout and which deserves to attract attention. This will be good for both and for the many customers who can benefit from such a data protection package, especially in Europe where both Asigra and ONStor are looking to significantly ramp up their operations. This amalgamation could well point the way forward for vendors with complementary offerings.