EVault, a subsidiary of hard-drive maker Seagate, has announced a new offering that allows businesses to back up their data to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform.
Following up on the company’s free EVault Endpoint Protection offer for new Azure enterprise customers, the company has launched Backup Services for Windows Azure. Despite the Windows-heavy branding, the product’s platform-agnostic approach has benefits for mixed environments, claims the company. It provides heterogeneous, off-site storage for enterprise applications, server data and operating systems.
“Because it can protect virtually any workload on a single cloud platform, EVault Backup Services for Windows Azure enables businesses to consolidate vendor contract issues and costs while also reducing risk,” boasted EVault in a statement.
Apart from the requisite support for Windows, the service also accommodates Linux, UNIX and IBM i. On the virtualization front, it protects data under VMware ESXi and Windows Server with Hyper-V. Finally, it also offers “granular restore capabilities” for Oracle databases and major Microsoft applications, including Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server.
EVault’s disk-based backup technology features built-in deduplication, block-level change tracking and compression to minimize network congestion. Its encryption and IT security protections make it “a perfect complement to the Windows Azure network of data centers,” asserts the company.
As Azure gains traction in business IT circles, the platform helps the company extend the market reach of its backup portfolio.
“More than half of the Fortune 500 is already using Windows Azure,” Terry Cunningham, president and general manager of EVault, said in a statement. “Microsoft continues to build out the Windows Azure footprint, giving customers more options, and extending the global reach of EVault and that of our channel partners.”
“Integrating our flagship product into this extremely successful platform is an opportunity for us to bring the power of our cloud-connected technology to more organizations around the world,” he added. Currently, more than 43,000 companies use Evault’s cloud-based backup and recovery services.
For Microsoft, Evault helps the software giant flesh out its growing Azure ecosystem. “By adding EVault Backup Services for Windows Azure to the existing portfolio of Windows Azure solutions, we’re able to offer our joint customers a reliable and security-enhanced data protection solution,” said Kim Akers, general manager of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism unit.
The offering enables IT organizations to “take advantage of the open, flexible Windows Azure cloud platform to help ensure their critical data is protected and recoverable,” added Akers.
Last June, Microsoft revealed that its Windows Azure customer base had ballooned to 250,000 and that new customers are signing up at a rate of 1,000 per day. Organizations are also gobbling up Azure storage.
“The growth doesn’t stop with customer volume—we continue to double compute and storage capacity every six to nine months and are simultaneously expanding into Japan, Australia and China (operated by 21Vianet),” wrote Windows Azure General Manager Steven Martin in a blog post.