Vembu Launches StoreGrid Online Backup ‘Virtual Appliance’

Vembu Technologies made available for production StoreGrid Cloud AMI, an online backup ‘virtual appliance’ on Amazon Web Services. With the StoreGrid Cloud AMI and the popular Amazon Web Services infrastructure, it is now possible for service providers to offer a scalable, secure and highly redundant online backup service to their small and medium business (SMB) customers without any upfront capital investment in a data center.

Online backup service providers can now configure the StoreGrid Cloud AMI virtual appliance to run as a backup server in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). StoreGrid Cloud AMI will use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store backup data from client machines at remote locations. The StoreGrid Cloud AMI virtual appliance also leverages Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to store meta-data information in the MySQL relational database.

"AWS is designed to help alleviate for our customers, the cost and effort associated with building, operating and scaling technology infrastructure," said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations and Business Development for Amazon Web Services. "We are pleased that the StoreGrid Cloud AMI is able to leverage Amazon Web Services to extend this service to their customers."

Even service providers who want to keep backup data in their own data centers can use the StoreGrid Cloud AMI virtual appliance as a replication server. This deployment would enable them to replicate the backup data into the Amazon S3 storage cloud, thus offering more redundancy to the data.

"Investing, managing and scaling server and storage infrastructure is one of the most complex tasks for any online backup service provider," said Sekar Vembu, CEO, Vembu Technologies. "StoreGrid Cloud AMI for Amazon Web Services eliminates this complexity by virtualizing the computing and storage infrastructure in a cloud."

Vembu released the Beta version of StoreGrid Cloud AMI in December 2008, and since then more than 50 service providers have been testing it. This production release incorporates feedback from these Beta partners, including the enhancement to use Amazon EBS as a temporary cache before uploading backup data to Amazon S3.

"There is a large challenge in the media industry for our broadcasting clients such as the BBC and Sky as we go over to a tapeless environment of backup and restore," said Harry Grinling, CEO of Support Partners (UK) Limited, a service provider that addresses IT requirements of the ‘data intensive’ media industry. "The flexibility that the StoreGrid Cloud AMI product brings to this space is great as today these mobile production teams do not have access to large backup infrastructure. By utilizing our workflows and StoreGrid on the Amazon Web Services platform, broadcasting clients can be sure that the footage and production information they shoot is housed in a reliable environment."

StoreGrid Cloud AMI virtual appliance is based on Vembu’s market leading StoreGrid Service Provider Edition, which powers the online backup services business of more than 1,200 service providers worldwide. StoreGrid supports backup of Windows PC, Mac OS X, Windows Server, Linux Server, FreeBSD Server, Open Solaris, MS Exchange Server, MS SQL Server, MS SharePoint, MySQL and more. StoreGrid also includes the most common backup features like Outlook backup, compression, encryption, backup scheduling, block level incremental backup and lots more.

"At Vembu our focus has always been to enable the smallest of the service providers to offer online backup services to their customers, and with this release we take this focus another step forward to make our online backup engine, StoreGrid, the default choice for all service providers," added Mr. Vembu.

Pricing & Availability
StoreGrid Cloud AMI is available for purchase now and is priced as an annual subscription per StoreGrid backup client, with $30 for desktops and $60 for servers.