Zmanda Cloud Backup 3.0 ($0.15/GB/Month)

Zmanda announced Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) 3.0 that offers several new product features including:

• enhanced geography control across datacenters on three continents;
• support for international character sets;
• optimized backup of Microsoft Exchange data; support for cloud-based disaster recovery; and
• Internet bandwidth management.

Zmanda also announced a price reduction for ZCB, making it the lowest cost cloud backup product available that addresses both desktops and servers.

ZCB 3.0 adds support for Amazon S3 datacenters in Singapore. Customers can now choose between four regional data storage options on three continents (North America, Europe and Asia), making it the most flexible geography control functionality of any online backup solution on the market. This feature enables customers across the globe to effectively utilize ZCB for their data protection and disaster recovery needs while maintaining optimal performance levels and ensuring compliance with regional data protection initiatives.

ZCB 3.0 also adds support for international character sets, e.g. Chinese and Japanese, which enables backup and recovery of files and folders with names in any language.

Backup of Microsoft Exchange has been optimized in ZCB 3.0, including support for Exchange 2010 and its Recovery Database (RDB) functionality. By using optimized backup capabilities, users are provided greater control and efficiency over their recovery process, allowing them to restore individual mailboxes or individual items within a mailbox, without disturbing user access to current data.

ZCB 3.0 also supports disaster recovery in the cloud, allowing IT managers to recover applications if the primary data location becomes inaccessible. This provides a complete and cost-effective disaster recovery solution for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) with limited IT budgets.

Users can control the use of bandwidth by using ZCB’s bandwidth throttling option. Setting the amount of bandwidth used during backups and restores will maximize network performance and reduce the impact on employee productivity. Bandwidth management is provided per backup set, enabling users to prioritize backup of some data sets over others.

"The physical location of data is usually transparent when backing up to the cloud; however, the legal, compliance, performance and even personal bias reasons for specifying geographical requirements for stored data is often a key consideration with online backup services,” said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Zmanda Cloud Backup is differentiated by allowing subscribers the flexibility and choice of physical data repositories on three continents.”

“ZCB 3.0 provides a cost-effective, highly optimized backup and disaster recovery solution for SMBs,” said Chander Kant, chief executive officer, Zmanda. “More and more organizations are turning to cloud-based backup and disaster recovery over traditional tape-based disaster recovery implementations because of benefits like ZCB’s new geography selection capability.”

ZCB is a simple GUI-based backup solution that allows Windows users to easily automate their backup and recovery process. This robust yet simple-to-use solution provides ongoing protection against disaster, user error and theft. Once ZCB is installed and the backup process is set using its simple scheduler, ZCB automatically backs up files, applications, databases, and networked devices to a storage cloud. The management console allows system administrators to schedule the extraction of backup data from live applications and the upload of backup archives to the storage cloud as independently scheduled operations, thus reducing the burden of backup operations on production applications and WAN bandwidth. ZCB can also be used to protect either physical or virtual machines. The backups are stored in a native format, giving users the option to access and reuse their files even without ZCB.

According to a recent report by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 80% of research respondents backup to disk storage platforms as part of their on-going backup and disaster recovery process, and 82% of the respondents reported that backup copies of data are stored off-site. The cost of backup to disk has decreased in recent years making it cost-effective to look to non-tape transport methods such as replication between local and off-site disk and use of third-party cloud storage. ESG predicts a one-third reduction in the use of physical tape media as backup media, and a one-third increase in third-party cloud storage by 2012.

ZCB 3.0 is available worldwide for a flexible pay-as-you-go cost of $0.15/GB/month for data transfer and storage on the cloud, with an additional setup and monthly charge of $4.95 per account for the protection of an unlimited number of Windows desktops and servers.