CoSentry With EMC Avamar De-Dupe Backup Software

EMC Corp. announced that CoSentry, provider of business continuity and managed technical services, is using the EMC Avamar deduplicated backup software to enhance its remote recovery services. Through the use of Avamar’s global source-based deduplication technology, CoSentry has been able to deliver an affordable, flexible and manageable service to clients looking to streamline and simplify their data protection environment.

With data centers in Kansas City, MO, Omaha, NE and Sioux Falls, SD, the Company looked to expand its disaster recovery services for customers ranging from large enterprises down to the mid-market. Avamar was the ideal solution to augment CoSentry’s offering.

Manny Quevedo, CoSentry, VP of Business Development, said: "As one of the largest business continuity providers in the Midwest, we needed a solution that would allow us to offer clients the flexibility of off-site or on-site recovery services. After reviewing a number of solutions from multiple vendors, EMC Avamar was the clear choice due to its ability to backup and globally deduplicate data at the source. Also, the ease of implementation and ongoing use was a key factor. EMC took the time to consult and understand what we were trying to achieve and delivered valuable insight, shared experiences and true benefits for our end user clients. That’s important to a service provider with our long standing client base."

With Avamar, CoSentry is now able to market an affordable solution that easily allows its clients to scale their environments and be flexible with their deployments, whether housed in a single site or deployed in multiple locations. The product’s easy to use interface gives CoSentry the ability to let its clients choose if they’d like to manage their recovery services or let the Company handle the entire process. In the current economic environment, clients are seeking high value, immediate return on any change in technology services. The new service offering allows CoSentry to deliver an important solution at an attractive price. This significantly impacts standing service level agreements by improving RTO’s (Recovery Time Objectives) and provides additional flexibility for establishing new RPO’s (Recovery Point Objectives).

One of CoSentry’s clients was facing mounting challenges attempting to perform its data protection and recovery processes for one of its large enterprise virtual environments.

Kevin Dohrmann, CoSentry CTO, said: "This client was not achieving their service level agreements around RPO and RTO for an environment spread across 425 virtual machines in clusters of five to six physical hosts. With the physical limitations that were obvious we used the Avamar technology to bring them on-line and they are now fully backing up their entire environment in less than two hours. Previously these backups were being staggered over 17 hours. This decreased the length of their maintenance windows and allowed them to meet their compliance requirements by replicating their data to our other facility in Kansas City, Missouri."

By improving CoSentry’s online storage services delivery to its clients, using EMC, the company is in the process of moving more of its clients to the Avamar technology.

Dohrmann continued: "We’ve already seen tremendous value since we began offering Avamar as part of our disaster recovery services and have already begun to test and deploy the solution in a variety of other services. At this point, we have an Avamar infrastructure that can support any client, regardless of size. This infrastructure can protect hundreds of terabytes of data and at the growth rate this service is achieving, the petabyte range is coming soon."