Signiant offers remote office data solution. Check it out:
(InfoWorld Daily Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) A Massachusetts vendor has addressed the problem of tape data backup in remote offices by removing tape from the enterprise entirely.
Privately held Signiant Inc., of Burlington, will unveil its Mobilize for Remote Data Protection product at the Storage Decisions Conference that opens Wednesday in New York City.
Mobilize is designed to aggregate data at the remote offices of a large- and medium-size business for transport over wide area networks (WANs) to a datacenter at its headquarters. Signiant is partnering with Sepaton Inc., of Marlborough, Massachusetts, which offers a virtual tape library system for datacenters.
Businesses are increasingly concerned about protecting data in their field offices by consolidating it in the central office, said Rich Vining, Signiant's director of marketing. "Companies realize that up to 60 percent of their data is in remote offices and it's mostly on tape. There is a big risk companies see in terms of data loss," Vining said.
Most remote offices don't have the information technology staff to effectively manage tape backup systems. "They're mostly sales and marketing people so it's not part of their job," Vining said.
A 2005 survey of enterprise IT managers by the research firm Gartner Inc. showed that more than 50 percent of them said they were looking for a better way to protect data at their remote offices, said Dave Russell, a research vice president at Gartner.
"I'm getting more and more inquiries from clients about how to protect the remote office," said Russell.
Russell is witnessing a trend toward disk drive data backup as opposed to tape back up. "Disk reduces human intervention and the risk of human errors or of tapes going missing," he said.
But tape still is a much less expensive solution than disk storage.
Signiant faces competition for its new product from companies such as Symantec Corp., of Cupertino, California, which in April introduced its Net Backup Pure Disk for Remote Offices, and Avamar Technologies Inc., of Irvine, California, whose remote office solution compresses the data at the field office to make it easier to transmit over its WAN to the data center.
Signiant is introducing Mobilize for companies with from five to 30 remote offices at a starting price of less than US$10,000 per office and a larger system for companies with between 30 and 2,000 remote offices starting at $75,000 per office.
Copyright 2006 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
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