Companies, especially those in the IT trade, have to be very careful with the word “guarantee” for obvious reasons. Lawyers, certainly, love the term.
Infrascale, a Los Angeles-area-based provider of secure, cloud-managed disaster recovery software, apparently isn’t worried by it. On Aug. 5, as part of the general availability release of its Cloud Failover Appliance, the company included, as a major selling point, the guarantee that it can bring a enterprise Website back up to speed within 15 minutes after an outage.
Since most conventional IT systems require hours, or even days, to get back on track after power has been lost or something has blown up, a 15-minute guarantee is a pretty remarkable service-level agreement to proclaim.
“This will become the centerpiece of our product line,” CEO Ken Shaw Jr. told eWEEK. “It’s also about a pivot in our messaging from backup to failover, which is the key message. We believe every company has the right to recover from a disaster easily and affordably.”
Infrascale is focusing its all-in-one disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) package on something called “push-button” failover, Shaw said. “This enables any company to continue operations in the wake of a server failure, application outage, or natural disaster,” Shaw said.
With CFA, Infrascale addresses any unexpected outage by using snapshots to record the state of a system plus all its data; snapshots can be as granular as 15 minutes apart, although most companies do snapshots once per day.
CFA is a thin, cloud-edge appliance—virtual or physical—that combines intelligent software with cloud services to provide failover functionality with integrated backup and archiving. Using a single push of a button, CFA can fail over virtual machines, servers, and applications in seconds, and guarantees an entire site in 15 minutes or less, Shaw said.
Key features of the CFA include:
—Push-button failover: IT administrators can virtualize and spin up critical business applications from the CFA appliance or within the cloud in minutes. Infrascale offers a 15-minute guarantee for failover to a second site. CFA supports a variety of virtual and physical environments, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Windows/Linux platforms.
—Reduces hardware, bandwidth, and software costs: Traditional DR and emerging DRaaS solutions often rely on expensive local storage, professional services, and vendor intervention. In contrast, CFA is completely self-service, empowering IT to fail over up to 200 VMs concurrently with the push of a button.
—Protects data with military-grade security: CFA offers multiple levels of data protection: encryption in transit, encryption at rest, and optional private-key encryption.
The Infrascale Cloud Failover Appliance, optioned as a virtual or physical appliance, is available through Infrascale’s partner network and selected volume resellers.
Nine-year-old Infrascale, headquartered in Redondo Beach, Calif., is part of the new Los Angeles-area Silicon Beach IT community. For more information, go here.
