ParaScale and Zmanda Deliver Disk-to-Cloud Backup solution

ParaScale, Inc., developer of cloud storage solutions, and Zmanda, Inc. in open source backup and recovery software, announced at Gartner ITxpo an integrated Disk-to-Cloud (D2C) backup solution.

Enterprises can use ParaScale to build a private storage cloud within the data center and backup securely to it using Zmanda. Unlike alternative tape or disk-to-disk backup and recovery approaches, the combined solution is extremely cost effective and enables organizations to start small using user selected commodity hardware, scale to petabyte sizes when required, ensure high-performance, and manage data based on user-defined policies.

Enterprises are struggling with ways to backup ever increasing amounts of data to tape. However, with backup windows staying constant, enterprises are moving to disk based backup, or D2D systems. But, traditional D2D systems are expensive because they consist of proprietary hardware and software, and do not scale well with increasing numbers of backup streams. To address these challenges, ParaScale and Zmanda are offering an integrated backup solution that can be used to backup to the economical cloud.

"Integrating Zmanda’s backup solution with the ParaScale cloud storage platform means users can run their backup process on commodity hardware to leverage existing vendor relationships and seamlessly scale to petabytes with no downtime," said Sajai Krishnan, CEO, ParaScale. "Zmanda is one of a growing list of ParaScale partners in an ecosystem we are developing to reduce the total solution costs of storage intensive applications by integrating value-add applications directly, affordably and scalably on our storage servers."

"Zmanda Backup Server is designed to fully leverage a cloud service architecture and uses the ParaScale cloud as the destination for all backup data," said Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda. "This results in much faster backups to the cloud when compared to a regular disk or tape. Furthermore, because the cloud is designed to handle multiple simultaneous backup streams, it automatically load balances within the cloud to direct each stream to a different part of the cloud. This ensures that multiple parallel backups are completed within the available time."

The combined solution also gives administrators the ability to assign different policies to data sets per ParaScale Virtual File System (VFS). VFSs containing data that needs to be kept more secure can be configured to have more replicated copies. The ParaScale software transparently copies data to other parts of the cloud to ensure that the right number of copies exists. Increasing or decreasing the number of copies is a single click operation and works seamlessly with Zmanda.

Availability
The integrated ParaScale/Zmanda cloud-based backup solution is available immediately and can be downloaded from the ParaScale and Zmanda website. For free, customers can try out the combined solution by backing up 4TBs of data using Zmanda to the ParaScale cloud.

White paper on the combined solution (you need to register)