Why use Asigra cloud backup software?
21st September 2012
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Cloud backup has only become commonplace relatively recently but
Asigra has been around for over twenty five years.
While many traditional backup technologies have made changes over
time to allow for improved performance, Asigra has only ever
produced 'cloud' backup software - although the name has changed
several times over the years - from televaulting to online
backup and now cloud backup.
Asigra was built from the ground upwards to allow for the backup
of large volumes of data over very small internet
connections. Bandwidth is now less of a concern but even five
years ago average bandwidth speeds were still very low and yet,
data sizes were still large.
Initially, there was a great deal of scepticism around the idea
of an online incremental-forever backup technology. Those
businesses which were struggling with large data volumes and
weren't able to fit full backups in their backup window were
already using either an incremental or a differential backup
strategy. These backup strategies were generally adopted out
of necessity rather than choice. Often they proved
problematic because if there was an issue with a single backup,
this could cause problems for all backups in that rotation.
One of the key differences between Asigra and other backup
software is that it is agentless and allows you to protect an
entire site with a single software installation. This
originally was an interesting way to do backups but, with the
widespread adoption of virtualisation, it became a major
advantage.
If you were running a business with 50 servers, for instance,
agentless backup was great because it meant you didn't have to go
through 50 different installations. However, once the business
became virtualised and was running 5 physical servers with 10 VMs
on each host, it meant that each host would have to do the work of
10 x agents. Asigra allowed for one single installation to
protect every one of those 50 servers.
This doesn't even take into account the security issues that are
solved by removing agents thereby minimising your susceptibility to
open ports.
Asigra has always offered many other benefits when protecting virtual server
environments. Some software will only allow you to backup at
a VM image level and others will just let you backup the data
within the VM. With Asigra, you're able to do both. For
simple servers that need to be restored very quickly in a disaster,
Asigra provides the full VM snapshot backup. Asigra can also handle
systems that require granular recovery and/or complex retention
policies.
A major selling point for Asigra has also been that it supports
a wide range of operating systems and applications, including
mobile devices. We have numerous customers who previously
were forced to use multiple backup systems to accommodate their
specific IT setup. Quite often, there would be one
preferred backup software employed to backup 90% of the environment
and then another product for an odd legacy system.
At Databarracks, we provide a fully-managed Asigra online backup
service with daily monitoring and 24/7 support at no extra charge,
as well as dedicated managed vaults for companies of all sizes.
To find out what our customers think of Asigra, take a look at
some of our case
studies.