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.