Start-Up Simply Continuous With Managed Services for Recovery of Critical Data

Simply Continuous, a recovery service provider (RSP) for mid-size enterprises, announced its flagship offerings: managed services architected for the secure and cost-effective recovery of critical business data and applications in the event of unplanned outages. Its Data Recovery Vault and AppAlive services stand alone in providing companies with the ability to protect and manage one to hundreds of terabytes of data, backed by the industry’s only service-level guarantee for reliable recovery of both data and applications.

                                                
Data Recovery Vault

Simply Continuous is backed by $10 million in funding from Greylock Partners and led by an executive team with decades of experience at leading enterprise software, storage and services companies including BEA Systems, Comdisco/Sungard, Mendocino Software, Onaro/NetApp, StorageWay and Telephia.

Simply Continuous services represent the logical next step in the evolution of enterprise storage. Data Recovery Vault (for data) and AppAlive (for applications) are components in the company’s Universal Recovery Platform, an architecture that integrates best-of-class deduplication technology with remote storage and recovery services in the Simply Continuous secure datacenter. The services are designed for an underserved segment of the business market that is frequently identified as mid-size enterprises: organizations that have terabytes of data but whose backup/recovery requirements are not covered by consumer/SOHO solutions. Conversely, these companies are also not willing or cannot afford to invest in currently available ‘enterprise’ offerings, which, while very powerful, are typically complex and highly customized, require significant IT involvement and may be prohibitively costly.

Building redundant datacenters for the purposes of disaster recovery is very expensive to implement, operate and maintain while recovering from offsite tape proves to be slow and, by many estimates, is successful less than 80 percent of the time. Yet, to best serve customers and comply with regulatory requirements, all companies are demanding reliable recovery from their IT departments.

Data Recovery Vault and AppAlive integrate into any existing backup infrastructure and enable customers to use an easily accessible web portal to monitor, browse or restore their digital assets. The Simply Continuous patent-pending Universal Recovery Platform integrates deduplication, network acceleration, secure transmission, off-site monitoring and reliable, simple recovery processes. Cost of the services is typically less than the combination tape backup-offsite storage that the majority of companies currently use.

Big-enterprise advantages at better prices
“As company data sets grow past one terabyte there are few online options for offsite data protection and, more importantly, recovery – all of which have been more expensive than tape, until now,” says Tom Frangione, Simply Continuous co-founder and CEO. “We knew from the very beginning that we needed to architect a service that could keep pace with spiraling data growth without adding significant costs for our customers." “We’ve learned that recovery is the true pain point for this neglected market. We are the only company that includes recovery requirements in every service level agreement for each client. Online backup is great for backup but companies that want to recover their data and applications, they choose Simply Continuous as their recovery service provider,” added Frangione.

Customers say Simply Continuous offering ‘pays for itself’
Companies such as Vocera, a leader in wireless communications systems for mobile workers, and Savvion, a pioneering business process management software company, have made the switch from tape backup and offsite storage to Simply Continuous. The companies cite improved recovery time, affordability, and the availability of reliable and flexible data recovery options as key to their decision to choose Simply Continuous services.

“Recovery was a huge issue for us. With tape, it took more than 24 hours and the efforts of multiple staffers to retrieve a fraction of our data,” said Amy Karabinas, vice president of engineering and IT, Vocera Communications. “The Simply Continuous approach is much more reliable and flexible for protecting and restoring both data and applications than anything else I’m aware of. And, we no longer need to dedicate significant IT time or resources to backup and recovery, as Simply Continuous takes care of that for us.”

The Simply Continuous services automatically and continuously replicate data and virtualized application images. Data Recovery Vault service incorporates more than 1,300 specialized sensors to actively monitor every point in the service infrastructure so data sets are ready to be recovered when and if needed. Customers can access real-time status of their data, as well as log and monitor issues through the Simply Continuous online portal. The data can be recovered in four different, independent modes.

AppAlive is the only virtual service that enables companies to protect and recover their business-critical applications in an easy-to-deploy and cost-effective way. It captures current images of applications, securely stores them and provides companies with a hosted recovery environment for their virtualized applications. “The service effectively pays for itself in 18 months, putting us in a much better position to recover in a disaster,” added Karabinas. “To have this type of recovery capability is unheard of for a company of our size.”