Press Release (U.K.)

Hardware Cost Implications of Data Protection Software
Asigra Provides Financial Evaluation of Hardware Costs, Common Oversights that Blow the IT Budget, and how Costs can be Reduced

LONDON: 16th October, 2007 – Asigra today announced the availability of a White Paper it has published on the subject of the hardware requirements and resulting costs when investing in data protection software solutions.

The Paper, entitled “Hardware Cost Implications of Data Protection Software; calculating TCO (total cost of ownership) without hardware costs is a dangerous illusion”, explores the different areas of a business’ hardware that can be affected by data protection software, providing hypothetical scenarios of what these costs might be and how they can be reduced.

Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, observed: “Far too often the financial evaluation of TCO ignores the hardware implications of the data protection software. This one simple oversight is often devastating to the IT budget and careers of the evaluation team, particularly for companies with multiple offices, whereby remote offices are now legally required to be included in a company’s data protection policies.“

According to ESG, Yankee Group, Gartner, Taneja and others, as much as 50-80% of crucially important organisational data resides in the ROBO (remote office/branch office). Unfortunately, the more offices that are protected, the more hardware is affected and the higher the costs. The vast majority of data protection software needs an agent to reside on every application server and workstation being protected. Then there are local data protection servers, which are required at every site, duplicated data issues, and ROBO WAN considerations, whereby data transport increases will require WAN optimisation equipment. It is therefore more important than ever for businesses to carefully evaluate their full data protection costs and look for ways in which to anticipate and reduce them.

Following is a hypothetical scenario of the total hardware costs of data protection software, which is used throughout the White Paper to illustrate the level of hardware costs to expect in each area of a business:

For a business that has 2,500 servers, 20,000 workstations and 80 ROBO sites, over 3 years:

• Agent hardware costs = ~$3,000,000
• Local data protection server costs = ~$640,000
• Centralised data protection media server cost = ~$64,000
• ROBO data protection storage (one of the 3 below):
ROBO burdened disk storage = ~$13,725,000
ROBO de-duplicated burdened disk storage = ~$3,431,250
ROBO burdened tape storage = ~$2,745,000
• Centralised data protection storage (one of the 3 below):
Centralised burdened disk storage = ~$13,725,000
Centralised de-duplicated burdened disk storage = ~$3,431,250
Centralised burdened tape storage = ~$2,745,000
• ROBO WAN Optimisation = ~$930,000

This provides a total data protection hardware costs for NON-de-duped disk of $32,020,000
OR
A total data protection hardware cost with de-duped disk of $11,496,500
OR
A total data protection hardware cost with tape storage of $10,124,000

However, the Asigra Televaulting software is completely agentless, which eliminates the agent hardware costs. It also de-duplicates the data, which typically reduces protection storage requirement by four times. Given these advantages, a user can expect to reduce their total cost of ownership by about eight times.

Using Asigra Televaulting, the hypothetical scenario would only have costs totalling ~$4,135,250, which is much less than any other equivalent data protection software solution.

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office (ROBO) online backup and recovery for enterprises and managed backup service providers. The company's flagship product, Televaulting, is used by global enterprises in the financial, insurance, legal, government, healthcare and retail industries with more than four petabytes of data protected. Asigra technology is used by hundreds of service providers worldwide who offer backup managed services to companies ranging from SMBs to Global 2000 enterprises. The agentless remote site backup and recovery solution provides simple, centralised management of the data protection process while eliminating the capital and operational expenses associated with agent-based solutions. Founded in 1986, Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with partner offices around the world. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.