EVault Offers 4-Hour Data Recovery Guarantee For Midrange Customers

EVault, which in late 2006 was acquired by Seagate, now gives customers of its Recovery as a Service (RaaS), formerly known as EVault Remote Disaster Recovery Service, a choice of four-hour, 24-hour-, or 48-hour recovery.

With the new SLA offering, EVault provides midmarket cloud storage customers a guaranteed four-hour recovery of data to the cloud without the need for them to invest in a hot disaster recovery site, said Terry Cunningham, president and general manager for the company.

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"We're bringing enterprise-class cloud disaster recovery to the mid-market," Cunningham said. "Historically, the midmarket customers could not afford to invest in hot sites."

Typical midmarket customers have neither the budget nor the distributed data center infrastructure to invest in off-site data protection, Cunningham said.

EVault, working through managed service providers or other solution providers, can offer the new four-hour SLA to customers with mission-critical applications which require quick recovery to full operations, he said.

With the service, data is protected in one or more of nine data centers worldwide, Cunningham said. EVault provides testing of the data to ensure it can be recovered, and provides documentation required by auditors if needed, he said.

"Testing is a requirement of ours to show we can deliver," he said. "We provide an SLA. We need to know we can perform. And customers in many regulated industries need regular testing."

Bob Burns, CEO of EverGreen Data Continuity, a Newbury, Mass.-based provider of business continuity services, said it takes a lot of work to develop a complete business continuity offering which must include the ability to recover a customer's data.

"What's really needed is the ability to get the customer recovered to operation as quickly as possible," Burns said. "What I like about EVault is that they made this into a service. They have team of people who are there to help if something goes bump in the middle of the night."

Offering a four-hour SLA option is important for midrange customers who understand that recovery time for some applications can be critical, Burns said. "Today, not having access to email is not acceptable," he said.

By tying data recovery for certain applications to business continuity, customers are forced to look at their RTO (recovery to operations), Burns said.

"We tie our own technology to EVault to determine what data a customer has," he said. "By tying it to EVault, we hit a sweet spot by helping customers determine their RTO requirements for data recovery as part of an end-to-end solution."