Category Archives: Infrascale

Infrascale Puts The Customer First

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 22.  Some expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Infrascale recently presented at Storage Field Day 22. You can see videos of the presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

 

Infrascale and Customer Experience

Founded in 2011, Infrascale is headquartered is in Reston, Virginia, with around 170 employees and offices in the Ukraine and India as well. As COO Brian Kuhn points out in the presentation, the company is “[a]ll about customers and their data”. Infrascale’s vision is “to be the most trusted data protection provider”.

Build Trust via Four Ps

Predictable

  • Reliable connections, response time, product
  • Work side by side like a dependable friend

Personal

  • People powered – partners, not numbers
  • Your success is our success

Proficient

  • Support and product experts with the right tools
  • Own the issue from beginning to end

Proactive

  • Onboarding, outreach to proactively help you
  • Identify issues before they impact your business

“Human beings dealing with human beings”

 

Product Portfolio

Infrascale Cloud Application Backup (ICAB)

SaaS Backup

  • Backup Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Box, and Dropbox
  • Recover individual items (mail, file, or record) or entire mailboxes, folders, or databases
  • Close the retention gap between the SaaS provider and corporate, legal, and / or regulatory policy

Infrascale Cloud Backup (ICB)

Endpoint Backup

  • Backup desktop, laptop, or mobile devices directly to the cloud – wherever you work
  • Recover data in seconds – and with ease
  • Optimised for branch office and remote / home workers
  • Provides ransomware detection and remediation

Infrascale Backup and Disaster Recovery (IBDR)

Backup and DR / DRaaS for Servers

  • Backup mission-critical servers to both an on-premises and bootable cloud appliance
  • Boot ready in ~2 minutes (locally or in the cloud)
  • Restore system images or files / folders
  • Optimised for VMware and Hyper-V VMs and Windows bare metal

 

Digging Deeper with IBDR

What Is It?

Infrascale describes IBDR as a hybrid-cloud solution, with hardware and software on-premises, and service infrastructure in the cloud. In terms of DR as a service, Infrascale provides the ability to backup and replicate your data to a secondary location. In the event of a disaster, customers have the option to restore individual files and folders, or the entire infrastructure if required. Restore locations are flexible as well, with a choice of on-premises or in the cloud. Importantly, you also have the ability to failback when everything’s sorted out.

One of the nice features of the service is unlimited DR and failover testing, and there are no fees attached to testing, recovery, or disaster failover.

Range

The IBDR solution also comes in a few different versions, as the table below shows.

[image courtesy of Infrascale]

The appliances are also available in a range of shapes and sizes.

[image courtesy of Infrascale]

Replication Options

In terms of replication, there are multiple destinations available, and you can fairly easily fire up workloads in the Infrascale cloud if need be.

[image courtesy of Infrascale]

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

Anyone who’s worked with data protection solutions will understand that it can be difficult to put together a combination of hardware and software that meets the needs of the business from a commercial, technical, and process perspective – particularly when you’re starting at a small scale and moving up from there. Putting together a managed service for data protection and disaster recovery is possibly harder still, given that you’re trying to accommodate a wide variety of use cases and workloads. And doing this using commercial off-the-shelf offerings can be a real pain. You’re invariably tied to the roadmap of the vendor in terms of features, and your timeframes aren’t normally the same as your vendor (unless you’re really big). So there’s a lot to be said for doing it yourself. If you can get the software stack right, understand what your target market wants, and get everything working in a cost-effective manner, you’re onto a winner.

I commend Infrascale for the level of thought the company has given to this solution, its willingness to work with partners, and the fact that it’s striving to be the best it can in the market segment it’s targeting. My favourite part of the presentation was hearing the phrase “we treat [data] like it’s our own”. Data protection, as I’ve no doubt rambled on about before, is hard, and your customers are trusting you with getting them out of a pickle when something goes wrong. I think it’s great that the folks at Infrascale have this at the centre of everything they’re doing. I get the impression that it’s “all care, all responsibility” when it comes to the approach taken with this offering. I think this counts for a lot when it comes to data protection and DR as a service offerings. I’ll be interested to see how support for additional workloads gets added to the platform, but what they’re doing now seems to be enough for many organisations. If you want to know more about the solution, the resource library has some handy datasheets, and you can get an idea of some elements of the recommended retail pricing from this document.

Infrascale Protects Your Infrastructure At Scale

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 19.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Infrascale recently presented at Storage Field Day 19. You can see videos of the presentation here, and download my rough notes from here.

 

Infrascale?

Russ Reeder (CEO) introduced the delegates to Infrascale. If you’ve not heard of Infrascale before, it’s a service provider and vendor focused primarily on backup and disaster recovery services. It has around 150 employees and operates in 10 cities in 5 countries. Infrascale currently services around 60000 customers / 250000 VMs and endpoints. Reeder said Infrascale as a company is “[p]assionate about its customers’ happiness and success”.

 

Product Portfolio

There are four different products in the Infrascale portfolio.

Infrascale Cloud Backup (ICB)

  • Backup directly to the cloud
  • Recover data in seconds
  • Optimised for endpoints and branch office servers
  • Ransomware detection & remediation

Infrascale Cloud Application Backup (ICAB)

  • Defy cloud applications limited retention policies
  • Backup O365, SharePoint and OneDrive, G-Suite, Salesforce.com, box.com, and more
  • Recover individual mail items or mailboxes

Infrascale Disaster Recovery – Local (IDR-LOCAL)

  • Backup systems to an on-premises appliance
  • Run system replicas (locally) in minutes
  • Restore from on-premises appliance or the cloud
  • Archive / DR data to disk

Infrascale Disaster Recovery – Cloud (IDR-CLOUD)

  • Backup systems to an on-premises appliance and to a bootable cloud appliance
  • Run system replicas in minutes (locally or boot in the cloud)
  • Optimised for mission-critical physical and virtual servers

Support for Almost Everything

Infrascale offers support for almost everything, including VMware, Hyper-V, Bare Metal, End Points, public cloud workloads.

Other Features

Speedy DR locally or to the Cloud

  • IDR is very fast – boot ready in minutes
  • IDR enables recovery locally or in the cloud

Backup Target Optionality; Vigilant Data Security

  • ICB allows for backup targets “anywhere”
  • ICB detects ransomware and mitigates impact

Single View

The Infrascale dashboard does a pretty decent job of providing all of the information you might need about the service in a single view.

[image courtesy of Infrascale]

Appliances

There are a variety of appliance options available, as well as virtual editions of the appliance that you can use.

[image courtesy of Infrascale]

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

Regular readers of this blog would know that I’m pretty interested in data protection as a topic. I’m sad to say that I hadn’t heard of Infrascale prior to this presentation, but I’m glad I have now. There are a lot of service providers out there offering some level of data protection and disaster recovery as a service. These services offer varying levels of protection, features, and commercial benefits. Infrascale distinguish themselves by offering its own hardware platform as a core part of the offering, rather than building a solution based on one of the major data protection vendors.

In my day job I work a lot with product development for these types of solutions and, to be honest, the idea of developing a hardware data protection appliance is not something that appeals. As a lot of failed hardware vendors will tell you, it’s one thing to have a great idea, and quite another to execute successfully on that idea. But Infrascale has done the hard work on engineering the solution, and it seems to offer all of the features the average punter looks for in a DPaaS and DRaaS offering. I’m also a big fan of the fact that it offers support for endpoint protection, as I think this is a segment that is historically under-represented in the data protection space. It has a good number of customers, primarily in the SME range, and is continuing to add services to its product portfolio.

Disaster recovery and data protection are things at that aren’t always done very well by small to medium enterprises. Unfortunately, these types of businesses tend to have the most to lose when something goes wrong with their critical business data (either via operator error, ransomware, or actual disaster). Something like Infrascale’s offering is a great way to take away a lot of the complexity traditionally associated with protecting that important data. I’m looking forward to hearing more about Infrascale in the future.