StorageCraft Technology has unveiled an enterprise quality cloud disaster recovery solution in New Zealand and Australia, offering all levels of business 24 x 7 data availability and accuracy.

“Starting today, every business can enjoy confidence, convenience and peace of mind in knowing its data, databases and even entire servers can be virtualised in minutes in the StorageCraft Cloud in Australia and New Zealand," says Greg Wyman, VP, StorageCraft.

“Historically, offsite or even cloud-based disaster recovery has been the privilege of major international companies with deep pockets. Today, StorageCraft has changed all that.”

Initially, StorageCraft Cloud Services across ANZ is available only through the StorageCraft MSP (Managed Service Provider) Partner program on a monthly subscription basis. This allows end users to cancel at any time if they are less than 100 percent content with the service’s quality, reliability or ease of use.

“No longer do businesses need to lock into long-term contracts," Wyman adds. "For just a small fee per month, per gigabyte, they can have near instant, ultra-fast cloud-based disaster recovery."

The new cloud solution is driven by StorageCraft ShadowProtect, which now delivers a single backup and recovery solution for virtual and physical servers. According to Wyman, users need to learn only a single interface and technology rather than multiple technologies for virtual and physical backup, recovery and disaster recovery.

ShadowProtect also supports all major hypervisors including VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix Zen Server and Zen Desktop, Oracle VirtualBox and Redhat KVM.

According to Wyman, StorageCraft Cloud Services in the region will allow a user to virtualise a server with a few mouse clicks, without having to buy, manage or maintain offsite disaster recovery infrastructure.

"StorageCraft has built an impressive track record for near-instant recovery," Wyman adds. "StorageCraft Cloud Services is not a permanently hosted solution for servers. It is an affordable temporary cloud-based disaster recovery option for businesses of all sizes.

"Depending on how often users send backups to the StorageCraft Cloud, which can happen as frequently as every 15 minutes, they can recover data or virtualise an entire server quickly to within 15 minutes of data loss.

"Additionally, creating a virtual private network (VPN) to enable full access to data takes only a few mouse clicks."

Another advantage according to Wyman is intelligent seeding, which allows users to upload their data to the cloud painlessly.

"Most cloud-based backup solutions take three to five days to “seed” or send an initial data set into the cloud," Wyman adds. "Usually this process is performed via a USB disk drive, but by the time to upload is completed, data at the customer site is three to five days old, and the replication process can take ages to catch up.

"StorageCraft delivers a timely solution by wrapping intelligence around the process.

"As soon as the USB drive is disconnected, StorageCraft Cloud starts sending incremental update files to the cloud.

"These are held in a temporary folder until the base data arrives. When it does, the two are merged and a customer becomes operational in a fraction of the normal time."