By Paul Schenkel
Leading global IT and research and advisory firm Gartner recently released its Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions. While each vendor in the Magic Quadrant has differentiated features that distinguishes it from the others in the report, all Leaders share the following attributes:
- Support for S3 Compatible Object Storage – a simple way to add secure object storage on premises or in the cloud across a flexible variety of secure storage providers.
- Support for multicloud – Midsize to large organizations generally use four or more cloud partners. This often entails various cloud storage providers for redundancy and infrastructure and application modernization.
- Subscription based licensing (pay as you go) – the cloud allows you to rapidly right-size storage resources for changing market conditions and usage patterns, versus buying and owning all the storage equipment yourself, which introduces capital expenses, potentially unused storage capacity, and ongoing maintenance costs.
- Other (VMware-based environments) – the Leaders Quadrant also applied the assessment criterion of strong support of virtual machines (VMs) and VM hypervisors, which helps enterprises to abstract computing and processing capabilities from the physical hardware for faster provisioning of services and other virtualization advantages.
As an open source cloud provider, ORock Technologies has built a platform that plays well with a broad set of backup and recovery vendors, including Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders such as Veeam and Commvault . Setting ORock as an S3 target for cloud backup can be typically accomplished with just a few clicks via a setting or by using existing APIs,
3-2-1 Backup as the Industry Standard
Protecting data whether it is customer or sensitive internal documents is top of mind for many IT organizations and CISOs. Having at least 1 of those copies stored off premise is becoming a widely adopted norm, including having the ability to readily access the data should it be needed for analytics, compliance or in response to a cyber event, such as a ransomware attack.
However, while 3-2-1 backup can represent a smart business intelligence retrieval and disaster recovery approach, it can be a challenge to manage all three instances of stored and distributed data without help from a cloud service provider.
ORock Storage and Infrastructure as a Service
- Zero egress fees – ORock’s private fiber optic backbone network and enterprise-grade open source cloud feature the latest HPE Gen10 secure hardware and a flat-rate OPEX billing model with no data egress fees.
- No vendor lock in – With major cloud platform providers, it becomes extremely difficult and expensive to move data from cloud to cloud or cloud to internal server. Your data is essentially ransomed contractually by the juggernaut.
- Hybrid cloud – A hybrid cloud storage strategy involves an off-premises complement to on-prem storage. It entails spinning up a third backup site, leveraging VMs and storage container software, that bolsters security and disaster recovery posture and allows you to retrieve your data in storage without paying tolls – i.e., cloud egress fees
- Compliance – Data storage is complicated by security and privacy compliance challenges as industry and government regulations require organizations to protect, store, archive, and access data over many months or years, and report on it. ORock’s infrastructure and cloud solutions were built specifically for highly regulated industries and government agencies with a focus on security and compliance. ORock is authorized by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) for use by the federal government and Department of Defense, and is compliant with HIPAA, HITECH, PCI DSS, and the aforementioned S3 compatibiity.
- Trusted Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) equipment and service – The ORock cloud is tested and proven to work on HPE hardware located in customer or service provider data centers. ORock and HPE bring relationships with many of the backup and recovery solution vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. The storage customer also gets access to the HPE Pointnext team for expertise to deploy and support backup and recovery solutions.
- A simple as-a-service model – Most cloud service providers make it easy to do business with them upfront, but then as part of the contract they charge you penalties when you want to access your own data in storage. In this complex billing model, pricing is not fixed and can get unpredictable depending on number of service requests from storage. ORock provides upfront costing with zero surprises and zero punitive charges to retrieve and use your own data.
Read the ORock 3-2-1 backup white paper, “Five Key Considerations When Moving From Tape to Cloud Storage”
