“Time for System Integrators to Ditch Tape Backup Offerings”

Ahsay Systems Corporation, a backup software developer, encourages system integrators to introduce the new backup solutions to their customers and ensures them with better future income potentials.

Magnetic tape once was the best backup solution available in the market for small and mid-sized businesses. But that was years ago, while a computer might only have a 500MB hard-drive. As the data size of a company grows exponentially nowadays, tape backup has lost its edge. In particular, the time needs to backup or restore a large volume of data to and from tapes is time-consuming. Not to mention that one may fail to restore the data from tape due to its poor reliability.

However, conservatively speaking, over 70% of small and mid-sized businesses are still using tape in backing up their mission critical business data. A main reason behind is that most of those businesses do not have their full-time I.T. specialists and thus need to pay monthly fees to system integrators in having them to maintain the tape solutions, such as changing tapes, maintain the tape libraries, etc. Therefore, tape provides recurring income to those system integrators and they are not willing to lose their bread and butter.

On the other hand, these system integrators knew disk-based backup technology has become very mature and is capable of handling hundreds terabytes of data effortlessly. With a solution that combining disk-based physical storage appliance with well-designed backup software (bundled solution), it can surely outperform tape by offering automated backups, integrity checking, fully backup report, easy backup and user management, etc. The solution is just too good that offering this new backup solution to customers using tape means loosing long term recurring income. Therefore, these system integrators are not willing to introduce this solution to small and mid-sized businesses.

Ken Hau, the Sales Manager of Ahsay Systems Corporation, explains in details why such perception is indeed incorrect and illustrates how the company’s bundled solution of physical backup appliance and software can help system integrators generate more recurring income than offering tape. “Other than the standard on-site setup, a configurations and consultations service that System Integrators can generate by offering either Tape or bundled solution, real-time data replication services to a remote location is the technology that will guarantee stable recurring incomes. Since data are being backed up in-house, to safeguard against onsite disastrous events, they can offer data replication service in which their clients’ data will be hosted at their data centre. In addition, they can also offer replication server maintenances service to their clients. As all these services can be performed remotely at their office, thus it will save them lots of time, efforts and money in traveling to their clients’ location.”

In fact, offer this bundled solution will be a desirable practice in a longer run. “As tape often fails during data restoration process, if system integrators’ clients have lost their critical business data because of the inability to restore, it will definitely affect their hard earned business reputations and profits,” Ken Hau emphasized.