Infrascale Intros New SSD-based DR Appliances

‘Disaster recovery need the performance so customers can recover and quickly run at scale. We have a lot of customers in the engineering and aerospace industries who are running CAD (computer-aided design) all day. If they have a system go down, they need it up and running right away,’ says Parker Merrill, director of sales engineering at cybersecurity solution provider Simpatico Systems.

Data protection software and appliance developer Infrascale Wednesday unveiled six new additions to its Infrascale Disaster Recovery line of disaster recovery appliances targeting MSPs and other solution providers servicing SMB and mid-market clients.

The new appliances, part of the Infrascale Backup and Disaster Recovery, or IBDR, line, include two models which are Infrascale’s first foray into high-performance SSD-based recovery offerings, said Brian Kuhn, chief operating officer and chief product officer of the Reston, Va.-based company.

“With the new Infrascale Backup and Disaster Recovery models, we are offing increased performance and scalability and new flexibility for our partners’ SMB customers,” Kuhn told CRN.

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Infrascale’s disaster recover appliances sit on-premises to back up images of a customer’s data and transport those images in a deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted fashion to the cloud, Kuhn said.

“But the appliances are also keeping those deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted images on-premises as well,” he said. “The appliances do image or file and folder backups. The backups are done locally for low latency. If a single server goes down, the data can be spun up on the appliance or in the cloud. If more than one server goes down, multiple applications can be spun up on the appliance. If the whole site goes down, customers can quickly recover to the cloud.”

For higher-performance applications, Infrascale is introducing two new appliances featuring SSDs, Kuhn said. All six new models also feature refreshed hardware optimized for small business or midmarket use cases, and includes the company’s own high-speed Deduplication File System, or DDFS, he said.

“DDFS makes every backup point look like a synthetic full backup,” he said. “The image can be boot-ready in an average of under two minutes.”

The appliances are also more flexible than in the past, Kuhn said.

“We’ve adopted a ‘public cloud’ model for separate compute and storage needs,” he said. “So if a customer has a small compute need but needs large data capacity, our appliances can do it. Or if the customer has a need for many smaller compute instances, we can do it. But for the MSP, they’re still getting consistent pricing.”

The appliances also do boot verification, Kuhn said.

“Once a day, the appliances boot all the backup jobs to make sure they will boot, and provides screenshots as proof,” he said. “We want to make sure customers’ data is protected and can get up and running as quickly as possible.”

Getting the extra performance of SSD-based storage for disaster recovery is a really good story for Infrascale, said Parker Merrill, director of sales engineering at Simpatico Systems, a Lubbock, Texas-based cybersecurity solution provider.

“Disaster recovery need the performance so customers can recover and quickly run at scale,” Merrill told CRN. “We have a lot of customers in the engineering and aerospace industries who are running CAD (computer-aided design) all day. If they have a system go down, they need it up and running right away.”

Merrill said he and his team have been talking about the need to add an SSD option to Infrascale’s disaster recovery appliances. “It’s nice to have a vendor partner who listens,” he said.

Infrascale proved itself during the freak snowstorm which last month shut down nearly all of Texas, Merrill said.

“We had multiple customers who got hit by the big storm which could cut power quickly,” he said. “We had at least four customers declare disaster situations. With Infrascale, we were able to get them up and running quickly. One customer has a very large battery backup system, and so faced only a 10-minute interruption. At times, preparing for a disaster can be annoying. But to see the plans work is a very cool experience.”

Infrascale’s business model is, and always has been, focused on taking out the capital expense for backup and disaster recovery, Kuhn said.

“We do have an option so if a larger MSP needs a capital expense, we can do it,” he said. “But that’s not our focus. We offer consistent cost to our MSPs because that’s what they want to provide to their customers.”