Features - Storage Innovations:

AGILITI LAUNCHES AgileVault DATA PROTECTION SERVICE

Agiliti Inc, a leading IT services provider, announced a new data protection service to meet the growing need for organizations of all sizes to backup, protect and recover the data critical to the operation of their business.

"Data protection is a high-level priority for IT organizations in 2004," said Tom Kieffer, CEO of Agiliti. "By leveraging new technology advances that enable faster, lower cost backups, we were able to rapidly develop a service to meet these growing needs."

The whole data backup process has been cumbersome at best. The Yankee Group estimates that between 50-60 percent of all server data backups fail. Another study, by the University of Texas, revealed that after a disaster involving data loss occurs, 43 percent of businesses never re-open, and another 51 percent close within two years. Data backup is part of a much larger picture that companies must address today, including: exploding data growth and their ability to manage it; geographically dispersed environments, fueled by industry consolidation (mergers and acquisitions); constant operating system and application changes; and vastly increased regulatory requirements.

"The data backup service we're introducing is designed to help our customers address all these challenges today," Kieffer said.

This new service, "AgileVault," is provided on an outsourced basis, as are all Agiliti's managed IT services. Agiliti provides the management software required to perform the backup and restore operations, and the secure disk infrastructure for storage of the data. Backup agents are deployed on each server, and customers can manage backups for dispersed locations from one central management console at their own location. By using a combination of data compression and delta block technologies, any device connected to an IP network can be backed-up.

"As any IT professional working with data protection knows, backups are only half the picture," said Craig Schmidtke, vice president of engineering at Agiliti. "The true measure of success is the restoration of lost data -- specifically, both the data integrity and speed of recovery."

Industry wide, data integrity on tape media averages 80 percent, whereas the disk infrastructure of the AgileVault service provides 100 percent data integrity. Another common headache with traditional backup software is knowledge of whether the backup task was successful. Unlike traditional software that requires an end-user to review daily log files to confirm that a task was successful, the AgileVault service provides daily e-mail notification of success or failure.

The AgileVault service also provides advantages in data accessibility and speed of recovery. In a typical tape-backup scenario, a customer would start the recovery process by recalling their tape from an off-site storage facility. Providers usually guarantee delivery of the tapes within four hours from receipt of the request, which means the customer can't even start to recover the data for four hours. With the AgileVault service, a customer's off-site stored data is available at the click of a mouse and allows recovery of any file or system to any location -- on-demand.

Thus, this new service offering is in line with Agiliti's "utility computing" service strategy. It gives customers a pay-as-you-use, scalable solution. With no hardware or media purchase required, customers can either replace existing antiquated solutions, or just use the AgileVault service to manage their data growth.

Agiliti's first customer for this service is the Oppenheimer Wolff and Donnelly law firm in Minneapolis. "We wanted more reliable data backups, because tapes do fail," said Ardys Moen, IT director. "But more than that, we saw significant cost savings, because we were spending a lot of time and resources in managing tape rotations. Our whole backup process is automated now with the disk-based AgileVault service."

In fact, Oppenheimer signed on as an Agiliti customer specifically because of this service. "We're moving all our data backups to AgileVault," said Moen. "I really see it as the future of data protection."

This Agiliti service offering came out of the company's own requirements for data backup. "With more than 400 servers and 11 terabytes of data under management, we were facing our own backup issues," said Agiliti's Schmidtke. "To deliver on our service-level agreements, we needed a scaleable solution that was 100 percent reliable. Once we developed our internal platform and realized all the advantages, it only made sense to turn it into a service offering for our customers."

Schmidtke gave a recent example: "Shortly after we'd implemented the technology, one of our customers made a change to their Oracle database that rendered the database useless. With the AgileVault service, we were able to get them back on-line in less than 90 minutes. Under the previous environment, it would be been four hours to receive their tapes, and another two to three hours to restore this two-gigabyte database. That difference is huge in terms of the cost impact downtime has on businesses today."

Besides the AgileVault service, Agiliti's offerings include a spectrum of IT services from infrastructure professional services to managed hosting services. The AgileVault service dovetails perfectly with Agiliti's disasterrecovery services and further enhances the company's ability to offer a single-vendor solution to its customers.