What do you know about Asigra? What if I told you there is a good chance that you have used its products but never knew it? During VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to sit in on a briefing from Asigra at the Tech Field Day Extra event. I had heard of Asigra before but could not have told you much about the company or its product offerings before this briefing. Asigra is a company that specializes in backup and recovery, and it has been doing so for over a quarter century.
The reason you might not have heard of Asigra is that it does not sell direct. It supports and invests in a global ecosystem of managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers, and it does not compete with its partners. That is why there is a better chance that you have used one of Asigra’s rebranded products than one branded with the company’s own name.
After the briefing and its explanation of Asigra’s business model, I started to wonder why it had wanted to hold the briefing with engineers and bloggers. I was really left wondering if perhaps a change in Asigra’s business model was somewhere on the horizon, or if it was just looking to expand its brand name. Regardless of the reasoning, Asigra has passed the test of time and has a wide variety of products and solutions available.
One of the first points that were made during the briefing was that Asigra works well with both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Asigra has also worked very hard to handle and support enterprise applications, which include file servers, database servers, virtual machines, and end user devices, as well as Google, Salesforce, and Office 365, to name just a few.
In addition to offering a solid ability to back up and recover enterprise applications, Asigra has decided to move away from the norm in its presentation and support of both backup and recovery. It has split the offering into two different models: one based on the backups themselves and the other based on performance and recovery. It is this recovery license model that diverges the most from the way the majority of backup companies handle and support the recovery of data. Costs follow something like a sliding scale based on the amount of data that is recovered. Disaster recovery tests that are scheduled with at least a thirty-day notice are not counted toward the cost of the recovery model. Replication of the data is included as part of the backup and recovery suite and is presented as part of the backup and recovery tool kit.
For me personally, the most intriguing part of the briefing was when Asigra representatives were trying their best to talk about the unique way that they are able to perform the recovery of the data without doing a mount for the restore process. Although I and the other engineers and bloggers who were on the panel tried in vain to get more details about this no-mount recovery process, the presenters were very tight-lipped about the specifics and the details, as the technology is in its patent pending and approval phase.
All in all, Asigra is a company that has a lot to offer its clients and customers, even if most of the end users of its products haven’t heard of the company’s name before. This has me taking a closer look at the different technologies my clients and customers are taking advantage of and utilizing in their day to day operations.
What do you know about Asigra?
I have been working on ASIGRA backup and recovery product from the past 2 and a half years and have implemented the same at many customers, from my not-so-far experience I can say that ASIGRA backup product is a complete solution in itself be it any environment Exchange, VMware, SQL, Oracle, Google Apps, File Server, etc. The best part is its agentless framework which enables one to manage the entire client centrally.
The Best thing about Asigra Backup solution is its simplicity in managing Backups. specially when we talk about Licensing, Capacity based licensing gives end customers an ease to take Backup of as many as possible host/End systems. Features like agentless Backup, client based backups for mobile users, single solution for variety of Application andDB backups gives Asigra an Ideal Backup solution.