The improved functionality will help Intronis partners have discussions with customers about providing higher-value recovery strategies rather than simply selling storage.
Neal Bradbury, Co-Founder, and Vice President of Channel Development at Intronis
Backup and data protection solution provider Intronis has announced the Winter 2015 release of its Intronis ECHOplatform. The key improvement for the company’s partners is significant improvement in its image-based recovery, relating to Hyper-V, to physical server environments, and to object level restore for both physical and virtual local image-based backups.
“This is a significant upgrade to our ECHOplatform, which sets the stage for the future and more additions to the platform,” said Neal Bradbury, Co-Founder, and Vice President of Channel Development at Intronis.
The changes follow up a mega-change in Intronis’s pricing last year, where they changed their old cost-per-GB model to a flat rate for unlimited cloud and local storage, and introduced ECHOplatform, which was specifically designed to support the new pricing model.
“It has met our expectations, and allows us to change the conversations from gigabytes to the strategy of how resellers should be protecting and supporting a business, and that in turn ripples into the reseller conversations with customers,” Bradbury said. “We are really pushing partners to get out of the ‘selling of storage’ business to selling recovery strategies. That highlights their value, and they increase their revenues.” By accelerating real-time recovery, the new release makes those recovery strategies much more effective.
For Hyper-V environments, new Hyper-V Rapid Recovery now lets partners be able to offer Hyper-V environment recovery from local image-based storage in as fast as 30 seconds, improving support for hybrid IT environments.
“Previously, this could take an hour, so the improvement is significant,” Bradbury said.
Rapid recovery for physical server environments from local image-based storage has also been simplified with a combination of advanced algorithms, native data formats and reverse incremental backup techniques.
“This is new functionality,” Bradbury said. “We had partners who were using Hyper-V rapid recovery and imaging recovery before, but just the backup piece of it. When they had to restore it, it would be longer from a recovery time objective. This lowers it to minutes from hours.”
Object-level restore, which has always been the backbone of Intronis’ business, has also been enhanced. Partners can now retrieve specific files, folders, and databases from physical and virtual local image-based backups with greater ease, accuracy and efficiency.
“We are now doing object recovery from an image,” Bradbury said. “Our roots are in file folder/object level recovery, and we put that background into recovering objects from these images so that it is really, really fast.”
This release is also VMware 6.0 Ready, so partners can provide native backup for the upcoming release of the industry’s leading hypervisor platform.
While Intronis began as a backup vendor, and backup and restore remains the heart of their business, they have been adding new capabilities to the ECHOplatform, such as a sync and share collaboration solution last fall.
“We are seeing greater use of these new capabilities, and they have been instrumental in attracting new partners to Intronis,” Bradbury said.
