Press Release (U.S.)

Asigra First to Deliver Agentless CDP as Integrated Feature for ROBO Backup
Industry leader achieves another software technology milestone

TORONTO – September 12, 2006 – Asigra™, the technology specialists in agentless remote backup and recovery software, today announced a major enhancement to its Televaulting™ software with the addition of agentless Continuous Data Protection (CDP) functionality, providing event-based real-time backup of changed data to virtually eliminate data loss for Windows, Linux, and Microsoft Exchange environments.

Asigra's Continuous Data Protection makes Televaulting the first remote office/branch office (ROBO) distributed backup software to add agentless CDP functionality and to do so without charging users any additional licensing. Televaulting pricing is based on a ‘pay as you grow’ model where users only pay for the actual amount of compressed data stored in the repository.

According to Thomas Dugan, President, eSource Group, a leading IT outsourcing company based in Philadelphia, Pa., "Our clients trust us to provide the best business continuity and disaster recovery services – their businesses depend on it. Despite the significant need, up until now CDP has not been available for remote office/branch office backup. Televaulting's CDP feature ensures the utmost in ROBO data protection for our customers without a huge increase in backend data accumulation because of its retention rules."

Televaulting CDP provides a more efficient backup option based on its virtually unlimited granularity. Customers can now restore data from an infinite number of recovery point objectives, while the backup window and recovery time objectives are effectively reduced to zero. Asigra delivers these benefits without the need for excessive backend storage accumulation to support the CDP functionality, minimizing capacity requirements resulting in additional customer cost savings.

“CDP has quickly become a highly desirable requirement for many enterprise operations,” said Marc Staimer, President and CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Offering this functionality as a non-chargeable agentless feature of their distributed backup software is a stroke of genius. It has the potential of radically altering the data protection market landscape.”

“Continuous Data Protection further removes the data loss vulnerabilities between regular scheduled backups by optimizing Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), adding another powerful feature to the Asigra Televaulting platform, without adding cost,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “At Asigra, we see CDP as an integral part of the backup solution, not a separate add-on product to be purchased, installed and managed.”

CDP is deployed as a no-charge integrated feature of the DS-Client component of Asigra Televaulting software, which is installed at the remote sites. When CDP is enabled, the DS-Client monitors the specified data source and whenever changes are detected, data is automatically backed up offsite. The DS-Client maintains Asigra’s agentless architecture even when CDP is being performed. Agentless CDP is enabled for Windows and UNIX file systems, and for Microsoft Exchange using Televaulting’s Message Level Restore functionality.

CDP operations are not impacted by occasional small data recovery and file restoration operations. The DS-Client allows these actions while CDP backup is still active, ensuring that no data is put at risk during a recovery. Restores can be performed from the local copy or from the offsite vault.

The DS-Client also provides automatic retention policies enforcement without manual intervention once the initial retention rules are set. Retention enforcement is enabled for both regular and CDP backup, and separate retention configurations can be established for both local and offsite data storage.

To minimize the bandwidth demands for remote backup, including CDP, Asigra Televaulting incorporates a series of WAN optimization techniques, including de-duplication, data compression, block-level incremental backup and incremental forever backup. Additionally, backup data sent over a WAN from a remote site to a data center is protected by encryption up to AES 256 in flight and at rest.

Asigra has architected its CDP solution to mitigate anticipated WAN latency issues. If the WAN speed cannot keep up with the CDP data load, Asigra CDP dynamically and automatically adjusts the RPO granularity based on the available WAN capacity. The objective is to do the best possible job with the available infrastructure, instead of not doing anything. For example, an administrator may want to capture 10GB of changed data per second. If his DSL connection is not robust enough to transmit that changed data successfully, he may be able to transmit changes every five or 10 minutes. Bandwidth-throttling is also integrated into the solution.

Asigra CDP is currently available as part of the Asigra Televaulting remote backup software. Existing Asigra customers can add CDP functionality at no cost as part of an Upgrade Subscription to Televaulting version 6.2.

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office online backup/recovery with more than three petabytes of data under protection. Since 1986, the company’s agentless Televaulting solution has centralized data management and eliminated the pricing and performance problems created by agent-based tape backup software in multi-site enterprises. Televaulting addresses state, Federal and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data center. Data is encrypted both in-flight over the WAN and at rest. Televaulting is offered by leading resellers and service providers worldwide to deliver highly secure data protection. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with partner offices located globally. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.

Asigra, Asigra Televaulting, Backup Lifecycle Management, BLM, and the Asigra logo are trademarks of Asigra Inc. All other brand and product names are, or may be trademarks of their respective owners.