Ninefold and Triplebackup Join Forces in Australia

Australia’s cloud services provider Ninefold Pty Limited has joined forces with DR specialist Triplebackup to offer an affordable, scalable online disk imaging and file backup solution for SMBs.

The service means a business can now have onsite and offsite data, DR and BC protection across its suite of physical, virtual and cloud computers with one solution. It makes near-zero downtime a reality for Australian businesses.

Until now, SMBs have operated with sub-optimal DR and BC solutions. Often there’s a need for manual input, such as tape or disk rotation. Many use file backup services like Mozy, or file storage and synchronisation services like Google Drive and AWS S3 that don’t mirror the entire server. Others pay for expensive solutions, with multiple license and hardware capex costs. Even when post-DR is possible, it can take days or weeks to rebuild.

Now, using Triplebackup’s Live Image with Virtual Failover service, a business facing a server loss can start using an exact clone in Ninefold’s cloud in a matter of minutes. After a site disaster, a server can be restored to the same or dissimilar hardware or to a virtual computer from the bare metal backup, in less than a day.

It’s a scenario Dr. Darryl Gauld, CEO and principal, Macquarie Education Group Australia, knows well: "We recently suffered over a week of downtime while we waited for one of our servers to be rebuilt from offsite file backup. This downtime severely hampered our ability to continue with our business. We were in mid-audit by inspectors from the Board of Studies and everything was inaccessible."

That experience was enough to convince Gauld to move to Triplebackup’s solution, which can backup base images up to 750GB across an ADSL2+ internet connection. Bigger images are accommodated on faster connections – it is expected to backup 15+TB images on National Broadband Network connections. The solution works across a business’ suite of physical, virtual and cloud servers, laptops, tablets and workstations, with no need for a dedicated Internet line, additional hardware, software license or capex investment.

Vanessa Wilson, CEO of Triplebackup, says their service offers SMBs affordable protection that works across their entire suite of computers: "It combines onsite image backup for local protection, and next-generation online image & file backup, with virtual server failover for market-leading post-DR and optimum BC."

Ninefold ensures that all backed up data and virtual failover servers are kept securely in Australia, without the legal and compliance requirements that come with offshore storage. The low cost of Ninefold’s cloud storage means the Triplebackup product can be offered at price-points that suit SMBs and Ninefold’s large-scale virtual failover capacity protects businesses even if a major disaster hits an entire city.

Gartner has reported that by 2015, at least a quarter of large enterprises will have given up on conventional backup / recovery software and will employ snapshot and replication techniques instead. The same report (The Gartner Enterprise Backup and Recovery Magic Quadrant Report, 11 June 2012) found that "by 2016, one-third of organisations will change backup vendors due to frustration over cost complexity and/or capability."

Wilson says that the same issues face smaller businesses, but, until now, they didn’t have the time or resources to commit to an effective solution. She says Triplebackup’s technology and user friendly interfaces, combined with Ninefold’s hourly virtual server pricing and low cost cloud storage, have facilitated a change that will have an impact on the SMB sector.

"We have made it simple for the end user, who can self-recover their files from their image backup via their own web-dashboard. We provide our channel partners with a scalable, zero capex market-leading service that fits a serious market need. Partners can now rebuild client systems in hours, and offer BC within minutes. We will be introducing cloud NAS backup in the coming months, so that our Partners can provide all of their clients’ backup and DR needs, from a single web-portal," says Wilson.