ACADEMIA

Asigra, the technology specialist in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing, announced that Air Force Center for Environmental Excellence, with headquarters at Brooks City-Base, Texas, has selected the company’s award-winning Televaulting software to provide a comprehensive disaster recovery and system restore solution for its mission-critical computing environment. AFCEE is a field operating agency of the Air Force Civil Engineer. The center provides Air Force leaders with the comprehensive expertise they need to protect, preserve, restore, develop and sustain the United States’ environmental and installation resources. For two-and-a-half years, IT managers sought a solution that would be able to restore all server data and applications, as well as required security patches, faster than the day and a half it was currently taking them. AFCEE would find such a solution in Asigra Televaulting, which reduced the restore window to two-and-a-half hours. Televaulting is currently implemented at the AFCEE as a disaster recovery tool, ensuring that the 2.5 TB of information backed up from 34 on-site computers is available when needed. A staged backup to disk storage takes place at the Brooks Air Force Base data center, where it is later offloaded to tape for archiving up to 50 years. “After 9/11, or if a hurricane or tornado comes through, and you lose your data center, what do you do?” asked Ralph Miles, network administrator, AFCEE. “Most people think of backup as a way to recover data, but more important is the ability to recover operating systems, applications and the necessary patches to bring back online all the system information. If managers are interested in a disaster recovery solution, Televaulting is a great product.” Because of Televaulting’s ability to provide multi-site backup, AFCEE is also able to recover data from its geographically dispersed Western Regional Environmental Office in San Francisco. If any of its 15 users lose or damage their notebook computers, Miles is able to restore data from the last time it was backed up at a docking station, upload it to another laptop and ship it overnight in order to have the user up and running the next day. Miles estimates that in using Televaulting to restore a couple of servers, it has already paid for itself. He says that its bare metal recovery ability and speed of recovery has made it invaluable. “Because of the requirements placed upon government entities in ensuring secure network infrastructures and minimizing downtime of mission-critical computing environments, organizations like AFCEE need to implement distributed backup and recovery solutions that eliminates performance issues and reduce restore lag time,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president, Asigra. “Televaulting speeds backup and restore processes by only including unique data that has not been previously stored, saving time, costs and storage needs for a more efficient means of disaster recovery.” Asigra eliminates many backup pain points through technology that is designed for enterprise-wide centralization, built from the ground up to perform on a global level. It is tested and certified compatible by leading infrastructure providers not to take the place of data center backup software, but complement it for multi-site backup and recovery. Business benefits that differentiate Asigra’s offering from other backup solutions include true regulatory compliance, reduction in worldwide IT management expenditures, and compounded reduction of both hardware/software capital and enterprise-wide license costs. Asigra also offers a “pay-as-you-grow” compressed-capacity-based licensing model, allowing users to pay only for storage under management. The initial implementation capacity is based on the amount of compressed data to protect. After that, customers are charged per compressed terabyte of additional storage.