In the past few months, our team worked tirelessly to prepare for the big launch on July 7. A new shopping cart, a new site design, a new managed hosting division, new advanced services … you know, the little things. I joined the team in the midst of this development and promptly made a contribution: We shouldn’t have a product line called Backup.
Bye Bye Backup? Absolutely Not.
Backups are infinitely valuable to all hosting customers, so I would never suggest that we eliminate the solutions enabling the backup of data. However, there is more to protecting data than just backing it up. Our goal, is to provide clarity around these data protection options so that our customers can select the best one for their company, that protects their data the way they need it protected. The data protection landscape can be pretty confusing, so it’s important for us to clarify where our products fit in the midst of all these hardware and software solutions that enable you to create and maintain full backups, partial backups, incremental backups, automated backups, disk images, and just about any other copy of data that you can imagine.
Data Protection
The goal of our data protection product line is simple: to protect customers’ data from accidental deletion or hardware/application failure. Each solution in the product line offers a different means to that end, so we renamed the product portfolio to better reflect the products’ goal. The Data Protection category encompasses traditional backup, continuous data protection, bare metal recovery and some disaster recovery abilities – and you’ll be seeing more products and services added soon.
Why do I need data protection? Doesn’t my storage protect my data?
Storage products generally have some level of data protection built in, such as RAID on disk arrays, and other redundant hardware and software features such as snapshots. These features protect your data from several types of events like component hardware failure in the device or if the data is corrupted by a user or application. So, yes, the storage system will protect your data – but not against every possibility, such as the device itself losing utility power or network connectivity. At that point, a copy of the data on another device — or better yet in another data center — is required. Designing a data protection strategy that solves the wide range of potential problems at an affordable price point can be a challenge.
Planet Alpha’s Data Protection Product Portfolio
Starting on the left side of the graph, you’ll see Network Backup (formerly known as NAS, or Network Attached Storage). Network Backup is purely storage space accessible over the network … we manage the storage hardware for your backups and you can access that space directly, through your own scripts or through third-party self-installed software.
To the right of Network Backup, you’ll see EVault™ Backup (formerly known as DiskSync). EVault™ Backup serves as a traditional backup product with software from a well-known vendor. In addition to the managed storage space provided by our Network Backup solution, the EVault™ software makes scheduling and maintaining regular backups of your data quick and easy.
Our Data Protection Server (formerly known as Dedicated Backup Server) uses R1Soft’s CDPServer software to regularly update and maintain iterative changes of data. Because the Data Protection Server maintains these block-level, up-to-the-minute changes, the software allows you to execute bare metal restores to recover your entire server.
To round out our current data protection product line, we introduced the ability to license and install R1Soft’s CDPServer software on your other servers in the event you don’t need a full dedicated server-worth of space.
Which Delivers the Most Value?
The beauty of this product portfolio is its flexibility to meet your needs, so the answer to the question for you depends on how much data you have to protect and how you want to do that. Network Backup is $1/GB, and EVault™ Backup is a little more expensive at $2/GB, as it includes backup software from EVault. Both these offerings are ideal for customers with less than 300GB of data to protect. Our Data Protection Servers are available in 4 capacities and start at $279 for the 500GB version, and the price per GB can be as low as $0.20/GB.
I’m a firm believer that everyone should have some kind of data protection. You might not need the backups all the time, but when you DO, the preparation pays off exponentially.
Limited Time: Backup Bonanza
With the new lineup of Data Protection products, we recently launched a great new promotion to enable all of our customers to try Network Backup and EVault™ Backup FREE for 90 days, and if you’re interested in the Data Protection Servers, you can cut the price significantly by ordering with promo code pa-dbs.
-Rob
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