Geminare Incorporated, a Canadian vendor providing Recovery as a Service solutions to the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector today announced the launch of the Cloud Storage Assurance 2.0 (CSA 2.0) platform. CSA is a cloud storage and archiving engine that provides an auditable backup and archiving solution that can be integrated with major public cloud storage platforms. The aim of CSA is the preservation of data integrity while enabling low-cost, cloud-based secure data backup and recovery without the risks and restrictions associated with vendor lock-in. In effect providing data portability in the backup and recovery area.
Geminare’s Cloud Recovery Server Replication service ensures continuous availability of applications by replicating a customer’s server environment in real-time to a cloud vendor of choice. CSA 2.0 will be available in Q3 2010 through a network of cloud hosting and Telco providers, MSPs and VARs, as either a standalone solution or integrated into the core Geminare Cloud Recovery offering.
The Geminare offering is yet another in the ongoing theme of cloud services democratizing software and making enterprise level solutions available to SMB customers. With this product users get archiving, search and audit that works across the entire email and file backup environment, all from a web based user interface. In terms of pricing, third party provision of storage complicates things but  Geminare report that they strive to set an MSRP (or suggested price) of $2/gb/month including the data storage costs (i.e. Amazon).
Key features of CSA 2.0 include:
- Unlimited Cloud Platform Accessibility & Flexibility: CSA 2.0 runs on the major cloud storage infrastructures and supports all file server platforms, allowing the customer to control where their data resides. Support for public clouds (Amazon S3, Atmos, Iron Mountain) as well as private or internal clouds
- Data Integrity and Authentication: CSA 2.0 offers integrity assurance of stored cloud data by applying a unique key identifier to each file, email record and access session. This allows users to authenticate data within any public or private storage cloud. An audit log tracks downloads from the archived storage environment and provides a unique CSA 2.0 receipt. Altered historical files within the cloud are easily identified through mismatched keys.
- Peace of Mind With Automated Archiving: Using the RaaS real-time replication technology, users can choose to have email and file server data archived automatically. Once the server and directories are specified, no other ongoing management is required.
- Specialized Search Functions: Productivity increases when information is easier to find. By supporting user-level controls, high-speed nested searches, and dynamic tag clouds, CSA 2.0 enables users to have customized search engine interfaces specific to their data retrieval needs. This robust and leading-edge technology, incorporated into an extremely fast and dynamic search engine, means businesses spend less time searching for data.
- Integration and Expandability: CSA 2.0 provides a REST-based open API kit that provides customers, partners and developers with the ability to write custom query integrations into applications such as eDiscovery and compliance auditing tools. This allows vendors in the document management industry to utilize CSA 2.0’s advanced index and audit capabilities directly within their own applications and interfaces.
The backup space is incredibly busy – on the one hand there are customers making their own arrangements using a stock-standard cloud storage vendor, on the other hand there are those providing a fully featured version control, DR and search offering. As to the ability of all these vendors to remain viable… that’s a post for another day.
