Data Backup Digest

DataProtect is an enterprise-grade local and cloud backup, disaster recovery and arching solution owned by Zetta. Their primary target market is small and mid-sized enterprises, managed service providers and value added resellers. The firm is based in California and was founded in 2008. Currently, the firm have more than 120 customers that create 4.8 billion file syncs per month. Some of their larger customers include Yammer, Mint and Washington State University.

The three-in-one service offers a number of functions: data backup to the cloud or local storage, application plug-ins (like physical/virtual servers and multi-platform support), data replication, disaster recovery (from the cloud and local) and SSAE-16 secure data centres.

The service boasts their ease of management, with quick deployment and no appliance required. There is a web-based management console, meaning there’s no steep learning curve to getting set up. Performance is optimised for data sets over 500GB and there is block-level change detection. As for security, DataProtect offers SSL encryption in flight and at rest, 24x7 US-based support and also 99.999996% backup reliability and 100% recovery reliability – very bold claims and impressive figures.

It is capable of storing many types of data, like unstructured, MS SQL, MS Exchange, VMware, NetApp and more. All major operating systems are supported, like Windows Desktop and Server, Linux and Mac.

Data transfers are kept minimal due to deduplication of the local metadata cache and the handling of incremental changes. Individual file changes are sent to the cloud and patched into the file system only after having been compressed. Also, since DataProtect is fully software and no hardware, processing happens o nthe client side incrementally, which minimises storage and network traffic.

“Zetta's cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solution is uniquely based on an extremely efficient protocol that enables distinct throughput advantages and, as a result, users have immediate access to their data whenever there may be a problem,” said James Bagley, the senior analyst for Storage Strategies NOW. “And with enterprise-grade features in a service that is user friendly, instantly scalable, and affordable, Zetta's solution is especially attractive to small and medium businesses,” he continued.

A recent DataProtect update has introduced a Snap After Sync feature. This offers the ability to automatically trigger snapshots when sync is complete. The firm claim that reworking code base results has allowed them to improve network data compression and they now have a 10x metadata cache performance boost over the previous version.

DataProtect is very much an enterprise solution and has the cost to go with it. 2TB of storage will cost $11400 per annum, but the service starts at $175 a month. Zetta’s vice president of marketing claims that the equivalent in off-site tape backups, excluding the cost of staff, would cost $37000 and thus DataProtect is far more cost efficient.

Further information on the service, including contact details and the ability to trial out DataProtect for free, can be found at the official website. The service has won a number of awards, so be sure to check it out to see if the service is worthwhile to you.