Press Release (U.K.)

Asigra Televaulting Delivers “Unobtrusive Virtual Server Data Protection” According to Research Report by Enterprise Strategy Group
ESG Touts Asigra for Agentless Approach to Solving Toughest VMware Data Protection Challenges

LONDON: Tuesday 12th February, 2008 – Asigra Inc., the technology leader in agentless backup and recovery software for global enterprises and service providers, today announced availability of a research report entitled Asigra’s VMware Optimised Backup from the IT analyst firm, Enterprise Strategy Group. The report provides insight into the value of Asigra’s agentless backup and recovery solution compared with agent-based solutions when deployed in virtualised server environments. The ESG brief precedes a broader report, Business Resilience for VMware Environments, which focuses on data protection options for VMware and highlights agentless backup and recovery for VMware.

ESG characterises the adoption rate of server virtualisation as ‘phenomenal,’ and notes the dramatic effect server virtualisation has already had across IT organizations. Rapid adoption is driving the need for backup and recovery solutions optimised to protect VMware environments and Asigra’s agentless software platform delivers on the requirements for highly efficient and feature-rich application and data protection.

In a survey of 709 enterprises on the rate of server virtualisation adoption performed by ESG, 48% of enterprises surveyed plan to adopt server virtualisation within the next 12-24 months and 52% already have virtualised server environments. In the same survey, 57% of respondents stated that their ability to better implement disaster recovery is a factor for deploying server virtualisation.

Unobtrusive Virtual Server Data Protection
According to ESG, “Asigra’s approach to protecting virtual server environments offers several advantages when compared to traditional backup solutions. For organisations that have deployed server virtualisation in production environments, a majority are placing a backup client agent in the host or guest OS. While these approaches most closely reflect how backup was performed in the physical world (and therefore is simple to understand and configure), they place unnecessary strain on the host’s resources compared with an agentless approach. Agentless backup also eliminates the need to configure agent technology in every virtual machine, as with traditional approaches.”

“Reducing capital and operational costs, better utilising resources and creating cost-effective disaster recovery strategies are just a few of the reasons why companies—both small and large—are deploying server virtualisation,” said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Asigra’s next-generation backup software stands apart from traditional backup solutions due to its agentless architecture and has compelling capabilities to support VMware environments.”

Asigra, a 20-year member of the backup vendor community, stands out because it employs a non-intrusive software architecture that optimises backup operations and management, delivering enterprise data protection from the core to the edge. Unlike backup solutions that have per-server and/or per-client licensing, Asigra’s solution is capacity-based, with licensing based on the amount of de-duplicated, compressed data stored. Asigra Televaulting requires only one full backup, and thereafter it performs incremental backups (only the block-level changes made since the last full or incremental backup are transmitted and stored). These changes are collected by a single piece of software installed at each location, where the data is additionally de-duplicated across all physical and virtual locations, compressed and encrypted before transfer to the staged backup server.

Televaulting for Virtual Server Backup and Recovery
Asigra delivers pro-virtualisation backup and recovery, giving multi-national enterprises with these environments the most powerful protection levels available. With 64-bit Televaulting, Asigra addresses the shortcomings of alternative backup and recovery solutions for protecting virtualised server environments by providing:

• Agentless backup optimised for virtualised server environments
• A pro-virtualisation pricing model
• Any-to-any restore capability (P2P, P2V, V2V, V2P)
• Live VM backup
• Fast and simple implementation and management
• Centralised management of VM backup and recovery from the core to the edge
• File-level recovery at the VM and guest OS level
• Bare metal restore

“Asigra has made a name for itself by addressing the challenges associated with ROBO backup, as well as capitalizing on an MSP model,” concluded Whitehouse. “With the widespread adoption of virtual machine technology, and more specifically VMware, Asigra has an opportunity to address one of the biggest concerns that organisations have with the ‘virtual world’ - backup and recovery.”

To access the Enterprise Strategy Group report Asigra’s VMware Optimized Backup, visit: http://www.asigra.com/form/signup_download.php?form=esg_vmware.

About Asigra Televaulting
Asigra Televaulting is agentless, multi-site backup/recovery software that combines utility service provisioning with a disk-based WAN-optimized architecture to overcome the limitations of traditional distributed-backup software. Televaulting’s simple, reliable and affordable multi-site backup and recovery consolidates ROBO backups to a central datacentre. With Asigra’s automated backup, IT management is not required as the entire process is administered centrally. With support for 64-bit environments, organisations using Televaulting will reduce network traffic loads, thereby reducing time and hardware requirements for global enterprise backup and recovery. This disk-based backup solution provides more affordable, scalable, reliable, secure and manageable backup than available with conventional backup products.

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office (ROBO) online backup and recovery software for global enterprises and service providers, protecting more than 50,000 remote sites. The company’s flagship product, Televaulting, is used by large 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 that offer managed backup services to companies ranging from small and medium businesses (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.