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Asigra has updated its service delivery platform called Televaulting for Backup Services Provider with several new features, which are designed to appeal specifically to service providers.
The newest version of Asigra Televaulting—an agentless, offsite approach to backup—is geared to the specific requirements of BSPs (backup services providers), who can offer the product to their customers as a managed service, providing a recurring revenue stream.
With this model, BSPs purchase the software from Asigra Inc., hosting Asigras DS-System software in their own data centers on their own hardware.
The agentless nature of the software allows BSPs to install Asigras DS-Client software on one computer at the customers location, which then backs up everything designated by the system administrator—databases, e-mail systems and other files on platforms including Windows, Unix and Novell—without shutting down applications to do it.
DS3 DataVaulting, a company focused on providing off-site, online, real-time network backup and restore services to midsized companies, uses Asigra Televaulting in just this way.
“It enables us to do what we do,” said Stacy Hayes, vice president of operations and business development at the Fairfax, Va.-based company. By combining Asigras software with DS3 DataVaultings data centers and hardware, the company has been able to deliver backup and restore services to countless companies in the Washington, D.C., area, he said.
To attract even more BSPs, Asigra has expanded its service delivery platform, integrating a multifunctioned billing system that creates invoices and commission reports as well as working with a variety of currencies and exporting data to a BSPs own billing system if required.
The new version also offers several features that allow service providers to more easily offer different service levels to different classes of customers. In addition to SLA (service-level agreement) monitoring and management, Asigra Televaulting for Backup Services Providers provides a Web portal that allows service providers to create templates of service levels.
“They can set up how they want their gold service to work and what they want it to cost, and they can do the same with their silver and bronze level,” said Eran Farujan, executive vice president at Toronto-based Asigra.
“With the gold level, they may include a specific piece of hardware and dedicated pipes, where the silver or bronze level might be more of a self-service level where customers go to the BSPs Web site, download the software and install it on their own—and less touching by the service provider means lower cost per gigabyte or terabyte.”
Hayes said the Web portal concept will provide several benefits for DS3 DataVaulting and its clients. It will allow the companys salesforce more interoperability with the mechanics behind setting up and administering client accounts, while customers will have more control over their data and knowledge of data growth trends and forecasts, which relate directly to billings, he said.
Finally, Asigra has changed the look and feel on the customer-facing side of the product—everything from the icon tray to the user documentation—by allowing service providers to rebrand the offering with their own name.
Next up, Farujan said, is support for more platforms and more items, such as configuration files for routers and switches.
“A customer might spend a day or two configuring a firewall, router or switch. If that switch dies, hell have to spend a lot of time reconfiguring it, but if you can save those configuration files, you can save him a lot of time,” he said.