InMage Boosts Recovery Options For Cloud Providers

InMage Systems has announced the ScoutCloud platform, which enables managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud providers to offer cloud-based disaster recovery, replication and backup recovery as a service (RaaS) to their clients.

The platform includes continuous data protection, a physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual recovery engine, automated provisioning of virtual machines and storage, and a portal for deployment and management that includes support of storage and applications. The company claims that vendors using its platform as a service can offer "near zero" recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives.

Centerbeam, a San Jose, Calif., provider of cloud-based services for disaster recovery and backup, uses the InMage technology and has integrated it into its platform, says Shahin Pirooz, executive VP of engineering, chief technology officer and chief security officer for the company. Primarily, the company uses the InMage technology as data replication for disaster recovery purposes, as well as for backup for Microsoft Exchange servers.

Customers can replicate data from one of their sites to another, from a customer data center to Centerbeam's cloud environment, or to two different Centerbeam data centers to provide both primary source and backup, he says. The InMage functions Centerbeam is most impressed with are its continuous data protection and its support for
applications that are disaster recovery-aware, such as Exchange, SQL and SAP. "There are other vendors, but we haven't found a vendor that does both well," he says.

The purpose of the platform is to enable InMage partners to go to market with a prebuilt stack and focus their resources on other aspects of their business, such as acquiring customers and increasing their revenue profile, as opposed to having to develop their own stack, says Rajeev Atluri, chief technical officer of InMage. In addition, because backup and replication is performed in the cloud and InMage supports the hardware, venders can offer a service based on operational expenditures rather than having to take six to eight months to set up an infrastructure, he says.While other vendors offer similar services, most of the larger ones offer only backup and don't offer full recovery as a service or allow it to operate in the cloud, Atluri says. The few vendors that do offer such a service have had to assemble all the various components by themselves, and no other provider has offered vendors all the pieces in one place as InMage is doing, he adds. While backing up data into the cloud has been available for a while, it is no longer sufficient and users need access to their applications, Atluri says.

The InMage ScoutCloud platform is available now, but the company refused to disclose how much the product costs. The company also announced a partner program for MSPs and cloud providers that includes sales tools, resources, training and support. InMage's platform is reportedly capable of protecting a heterogeneous environment that uses any kind of storage, ranging from direct-attached storage to an iSCSI storage area network to a Fibre Channel storage area network.

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