Idera Brings Affordable Data Protection to the Rest of the Enterprise

By Jerome M. Wendt on November 14, 2012 6:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment Rate this entry

One aspect of data protection that enterprises often overlook is the types of servers and the number of them that they do NOT backup. Enterprises are pretty conscientious about protecting business and mission critical applications (physical or virtual.) It is the rest of their production physical and virtual machines (VMs) which often go unprotected due to the reluctance of organizations to invest in software to back them up. Idera Server Backup 5.0's new licensing model that drives per VM backup costs down to as low as $15 per VM removes these concerns and frees organizations to cost-effectively extend data protection to all of their production servers.

Idera this week announced a new licensing model for its Server Backup Enterprise 5.0 (formerly R1Soft Continuous Data Protection) backup software that starts at $20 per VM and $200 per physical server. The impetus behind this aggressive pricing model is that organizations of all sizes are experiencing explosive growth in the number of VMs they manage. As this occurs, they need backup software that has an equally aggressive pricing strategy that enables them to affordably backup all of these new VMs running in production.

This is where Idera's new backup software licensing model comes into play. At $20/VM, the cost concerns that many organizations have about backing up these new VMs, many of which may initially start out as test, development or internal facing applications, pretty much evaporate.

Licensing starts at ~$20/VM though large organizations and enterprises that have hundreds or even thousands of VM to protect may see even more attractive price points. Idera offers a 250 VM client licensing option for $3995 (~$16/VM), a 1000 VM client licensing option for $14,995 (~$15/VM) and even an unlimited site license that includes both physical and virtual servers for $49,995.

This is not to imply that organizations only have to use Idera Server Backup to protect other business production physical and virtual servers that they previously could not protect. Idera already backs up more 275,000 physical and virtual servers that are in production worldwide. In hosting environments Idera has become almost the de facto standard for backup as it used by these hosting providers for three reasons:

• Its attractive price point makes it possible for hosting providers to cost-effectively scale and include backup-as-a-service to the clients that host their application servers with them
• Hosting providers leverage Idera's Server Backup APIs to centralize and automate the management of backup
• Idera takes snapshots so backups may occur as frequently as needed by each application

Idera Server Backup's heavy use by hosting providers has resulted in its brand and reputation being well established in that sector even though companies in sectors such as financial, government and manufacturing may be unaware of it. While Idera has made some traction in this space with it already being used by companies like Milwaukee Electric Tool, most companies will likely need a reason beyond its low price point to justify bringing it in-house.

This is why DCIG suggests that organizations initially leverage Idera Server Backup to protect their other servers running in production. The data on these servers often is either unprotected or under protected (think "in-house scripts" and "file copy" commands) in large part because the loss of this data only impacts internal users.

However scripting is not "free" as it comes with many hidden costs.  Administrators must manually create these scripts, test them, manage them and then be personally involved with any restores. This does not even factor in lost user productivity as a result of them waiting for administrators to recover data or business opportunities lost because users cannot restore data.  

Idera's low per VM price point makes extending data protection to the rest of the servers running in production viable. Yes, Idera still has a "hard" cost per VM but it is miniscule compared to the "soft" costs that organizations routinely incur when protecting these servers using scripts or simply crossing their fingers and hoping there is no data lost.

Further, by using Idera to initially offer reliable data protection to their unprotected and under protected production servers for the first time, they have the opportunity to learn how it works, gain confidence in it and explore the possibility of using it to protect even more of their production servers at a cost that may be up to 80 percent less than what they are paying now for backup software.

Idera's stated objective is to "backup every server on the planet." While it has the technology to do so, it first has to establish a beach head in organizations other than hosting providers. A low price point certainly gets their attention but holding it calls for Idera to also solve an existing business challenge they face.

Using Idera Server Backup Enterprise 5.0 to backup their servers that are either unprotected or under protected is the perfect way for them to introduce it. By using Idera in this context, organizations get more than a proven backup software solution to protect data that was previously exposed. They have put in place a foundation that they may eventually use to protect all of their servers at a fraction of what they pay now.

Solution Categories

• Continuous Data Protection
• Data Protection
• Disk Based Backup