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Startup Aparavi has a noble data storage ambition: It wants to better prepare businesses to meet the challenges of long-term data retention across new-generation, multi-cloud architectures.
Only a couple of years ago, accomplishing this really wasn’t realistic for many organizations—especially small to medium-sized businesses without a dedicated IT team. It was just too complicated and expensive.
To this end, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based newcomer has built a new software as a service platform from scratch to enable organizations of all sizes to protect data either stored or aggregated on multiple clouds and on premises. At the same time, Aparavi aims to break the typical barriers of cost, vendor lock, complexity and compliance requirements that face conventional solutions.
Aparavi, which launched both itself as a company and its frontline product Oct. 25, is led by an experienced team of engineers and executives from legacy backup companies who saw that data retention practices were becoming increasingly antiquated and wanted to build a solution that could handle increasing data complexities and compliance regulations today and in the future.
‘Cloud-Forward’ Approach to Data Protection
The result is what the company calls a “cloud-forward” SaaS application designed to work alongside an organization’s business continuity plan to ease the burden of compliance and data protection.
“Among the members of our team, we have well over a century of experience in storage and data retention,” Vice President of Business Development Jonathan Calmes told eWEEK. “We saw clearly that data protection is broken. The problem is that the engines that are being used now by most of the providers were never built to handle multi-cloud data fragmentation.
“Team members are asking us: ‘How do I balance long-term data retention and compliance within these multi-cloud architectures?’ The current solutions are overly complex, which leads to individual business units buying their own solutions and fragmented IT.
“Because of factors like using different clouds, bring your own devices (BYOD), using providers outside of what’s approved by the corporation, compliance really has become a nightmare in this industry,” Calmes said.
While most backup applications can move data to the cloud, managing that information and ensuring its availability across multiple clouds over time is a challenge most solutions do not address. Aparavi’s new platform works in conjunction with an organization’s business continuity plan to ease the burden of compliance and data protection while providing the freedom to switch between the most strategic or cost-effective cloud storage vendor of their choice.
Three-Tiered Architecture Only Minimally Impacts Workloads
Aparavi’s three-tiered architecture enables the company’s patented technologies to scale between local and cloud storage, minimally impacting workload while balancing network and bandwidth concerns. Point-in-Time recovery protection recovers data from any combination of local or cloud storage based on the date and time the data was protected without having to worry about where the data is.
Cloud-active data pruning automatically removes files that are no longer needed based on policy conditions to reduce storage requirements over time and significantly lower recurring costs. Multi-Cloud Agile Retention allows organizations to use one cloud today and to switch to another at any point with no interruption or migration necessary.
Aparavi’s open data format enables other tools to read data with or without the Aparavi platform to prevent any complications with long-term recovery. Finally, the platform’s multi-tier, multi-tenant structure allows customers to build hierarchical structures as they desire rather than force them to conform to a rigid, pre-determined mold to fit the software’s needs to more effectively scale across business units and branches, Calmes said.
Aparavi is available on all supported Windows platforms, as well as most major Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Red Hat. The platform uses the Amazon Simple storage API and supports AWS service, Google Cloud Platform, Wasabi, IBM Bluemix Scality, and Cloudian are among Aparavi’s certified storage devices and partners.
Pricing is straightforward; the first terabyte is free with subscription costs of $999 per year for 3 terabytes of usage. For more information or to sign up, go here.