Press Release (U.S.)

ESG Lab Report Validates Asigra Agentless Multi-Site Backup, Recovery Software as ‘A Compelling Solution’
Company’s Televaulting™ impresses reviewers with total solution that is optimized for backing up remote locations

Toronto – March 29, 2005 – Asigra, the technology specialist in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing, today announced the results of an Enterprise Strategy Group Lab Report on its Televaulting multi-site backup/recovery software that describes the company’s solution as “something unique and valuable to customers.”

The validation study by ESG Lab analysts Tony Asaro and Brian Garrett was authored after a multi-day testing period in which ESG installed the software on a server within an interoperability lab featuring networking and storage equipment from a variety of well-known vendors. ESG examined Asigra Televaulting’s ability to manage data in a centrally managed distributed environment featuring multiple remote locations. After testing was complete, Asaro and Garrett indicated that Asigra’s combination of agentless architecture and comprehensive reporting tools made Televaulting “a compelling solution.”

“We were impressed by the overall approach of Asigra and its total solution that was optimized for backing up remote locations,” the report summarized. “The Asigra agentless backup solution significantly reduces the complexity of managing a backup environment, which answers the number one complaint that we hear from customers about their current backup software. In ESG’s view, the Asigra agentless architecture is a major competitive advantage in and of itself.

“Backup and recovery software is an area of the market that will gladly welcome more innovation and ESG Lab believes that Asigra has brought something unique and valuable to customers.”

Among the ESG Lab Validation Highlights of Asigra Televaulting included in the 16-page report were:

• The Asigra agent-less approach protects information assets just as well as competitive solutions that require agents on every server
• Protecting a new remote site or server is quick and easy
• Restores are fast, easy and manageable
• Planning, reporting and chargeback capabilities are very useful
• Compression and de-duplication significantly reduces network bandwidth consumption
• Continuous increments reduce backup windows, WAN bandwidth and storage capacity
• Enterprise-class fault tolerance capabilities include advanced N+1 support
• Backup data traveling over the network, and stored on disk, is effectively encrypted for security
• A wide range of O/S, server and storage environments are supported

“It would be simple for us to sing the praises of Asigra Televaulting to the IT community and hope that managers would hear what we were saying, buy into the concept and beat a path to our door,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra. “But the truth is that an independently researched and validated test from a highly respected firm such as ESG carries much more weight. We are happy that the authors of this report were able to reach the same conclusions about our multi-site backup and recovery software as we’ve been touting for sometime – an agentless architecture allows for a simpler, more manageable and cost-effective way to safeguard an enterprise’s data no matter how geographically dispersed it is.”

Asigra eliminates many backup pain points through technology that is designed for enterprise-wide centralization, built from the ground up to perform on a global level. It is tested and certified compatible by leading infrastructure providers not to take the place of data center backup software, but complement it for multi-site backup and recovery. Business benefits that differentiate Asigra’s offering from other backup solutions include true regulatory compliance, reduction in worldwide IT management expenditures, and compounded reduction of both hardware/software capital and enterprise-wide license costs. Asigra also offers a “pay-as-you-grow” compressed-capacity-based licensing model, allowing users to pay only for storage under management. The initial implementation capacity is based on the amount of compressed data to protect. After that, customers are charged per compressed terabyte of additional storage.

Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises is currently available with prices starting at $11,250 USD.

About Asigra
Founded in 1986, Asigra is the specialist in distributed data backup and recovery solutions for network computing. With Asigra's Televaulting software, enterprises can reliably protect mission-critical information across all their geographically dispersed "data islands," whether they reside on servers, desktops or laptops. The privately held company is based in Toronto, Canada.