News
Forrester Research, Inc. Identifies Agentless Technologies as Being Among Most Efficient Methods of Backing up Virtual Machines
December 2010 by
Asigra Inc., a cloud backup and recovery software provider since 1986, announced it was one of the leading providers evaluated in a report by Forrester Research, Inc. published on November 19, 2010 titled "Market Overview: Enterprise-Class Backup and Recovery Software." The market overview establishes features enterprises should require when purchasing backup and recovery solutions, identifies emerging features that provide important new functionalities and business benefits, and looks at the top products in the field.
The report reviews established features such as broad platform support, tape and disk target options, advanced backup and recovery, and target-based deduplication. However, the primary focus is on the "new and emerging features that are the differentiators between competing solutions."
Asigra Cloud Backup provides all the established features as well as key emerging features identified in the report.
· Virtual machine backups with low overhead. The report states that agents are "the least efficient way of backing up a virtual machine." Asigra employs an agentless backup method, which saves time, is inherently easier to support, and is less resource-intensive.
· Source-based deduplication. The report notes that source-based deduplication "is an emerging feature...useful in highly virtualised environments and branch office environments where bandwidth is scarce...." Asigra Cloud Backup™ supports source-based as well as inline target-based deduplication, identifying duplicate data by looking for the same data queued for backup more than once.
· Operational and disaster recovery. The report notes that "In April 2008, Forrester predicted that traditional backup applications would evolve into unified continuity and recovery management suites...." Asigra is moving the market closer to that vision with continuity features that include continuous data protection and replication as well as global management of distributed environments.
· Restore options. Forrester identifies bare-metal restore to dissimilar hardware as a very important emerging technology. Asigra Cloud Backup performs bare-metal recovery at the block/image level, file/generation level and email message level.
· Disk to disk to cloud. Asigra supports another emerging backup feature that Forrester tags as "very useful;" the ability to store backed-up data locally then vault it to the cloud.
· Archiving and data management. The market overview notes that today only a handful of vendors offer such features. Asigra is one of them, with both archiving and tiered data management integrated into Asigra Cloud Backup.
· Future Market Shifts. The report also points to significant shifts that will occur in the near future. These are the shift away from tape toward disk and eventually the cloud; the shift to archives enabled by tape and cloud technologies; and the blurring of the line between backup and disaster recovery. As a cloud-based solution, Asigra Cloud Backup supports all of these shifts.
"Our solution is practically a template of the standard and emerging features that this independent research firm advises enterprises to look for when purchasing a backup and recovery system, and can be implemented as an on-premise, public cloud or hybrid solution, depending on the organisation’s requirements," said Ashar Baig, senior director of product marketing at Asigra. "By continually updating Asigra Cloud Backup with cutting-edge features, we’re able to offer our customers a single solution that incorporates everything they need to attain the best data protection available now. And our solution perfectly situates our customers to take advantage of the next stage in the evolution of backup and recovery."
