Zmanda Announces Cloud Backup Optimized for Asia

Wednesday, 23 June 2010, 17:13 HKT/SGT

SINGAPORE, June 23, 2010 - (ACN Newswire) - Zmanda(TM), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions, today announced Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) 3.0. ZCB 3.0 provides customers in Asia with up to 4x greater bandwidth performance than other leading cloud backup solutions. The new version offers several new features including: enhanced geography control across datacenters on three continents; support for international character sets; optimized backup of Microsoft Exchange data; support for cloud-based disaster recovery; and Internet bandwidth management. Zmanda also announced new worldwide pricing for ZCB, making it the lowest cost cloud backup product available that addresses both desktops and servers.

ZCB 3.0 adds support for Amazon S3 datacenters in Singapore. Customers can now choose between four regional data storage options on three continents (Asia, Europe and North America), making it the most flexible geography control functionality of any online backup solution on the market. This feature enables customers across the globe to effectively utilize ZCB for their data protection and disaster recovery needs while maintaining optimal performance levels and ensuring compliance with regional data protection initiatives.

ZCB 3.0 also adds support for international character sets, such as Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Japanese, which enables backup and recovery of files and folders with names in any language.

Backup of Microsoft Exchange has been optimized in ZCB 3.0, including support for Exchange 2010 and its Recovery Database (RDB) functionality. By using optimized backup capabilities, users are provided greater control and efficiency over their recovery process, allowing them to restore individual mailboxes or individual items within a mailbox, without disturbing user access to current data.

ZCB 3.0 also supports disaster recovery in the cloud, allowing IT managers to recover applications if the primary data location becomes inaccessible. This provides a complete and cost-effective disaster recovery solution for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) with limited IT budgets.

Users can control the use of bandwidth by using ZCB's bandwidth throttling option. Setting the amount of bandwidth used during backups and restores will maximize network performance and reduce the impact on employee productivity. Bandwidth management is provided per backup set, enabling users to prioritize backup of some data sets over others.

"The physical location of data is usually transparent when backing up to the cloud, however, the legal, compliance, performance and even personal bias reasons for specifying geographical requirements for stored data is often a key consideration with online backup services," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Zmanda Cloud Backup is differentiated by allowing subscribers the flexibility and choice of physical data repositories on three continents."

"ZCB 3.0 is the only cloud backup solution on the market that is optimized specifically for Asia, with Singapore providing an ideal destination," said Chander Kant, chief executive officer, Zmanda. "Now customers in Asia can reap the benefits of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery while enjoying the performance benefits of having a cloud datacenter local to their region."

ZCB is a simple GUI-based backup solution that allows Windows users to easily automate their backup and recovery process. This robust yet simple-to-use solution provides ongoing protection against disaster, user error and theft. Once ZCB is installed and the backup process is set using its simple scheduler, ZCB automatically backs up files, applications, databases, and networked devices to a storage cloud. The management console allows system administrators to schedule the extraction of backup data from live applications and the upload of backup archives to the storage cloud as independently scheduled operations, thus reducing the burden of backup operations on production applications and WAN bandwidth. ZCB can also be used to protect either physical or virtual machines. The backups are stored in a native format, giving users the option to access and reuse their files even without ZCB.

According to a recent report by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 80% of research respondents backup to disk storage platforms as part of their on-going backup and disaster recovery process, and 82% of the respondents reported that backup copies of data are stored off-site. The cost of backup to disk has decreased in recent years making it cost-effective to look to non-tape transport methods such as replication between local and off-site disk and use of third-party cloud storage. ESG predicts a one-third reduction in the use of physical tape media as backup media, and a one-third increase in third-party cloud storage by 2012.

Zmanda recently hosted a webinar entitled "Leveraging the Cloud for Radically Simple and Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery." During the webinar, Kant and ESG's Whitehouse discussed how organizations can implement simple yet cost-effective disaster recovery plans using storage clouds. To view a recording of the webinar, please visit http://zmanda.com/webinars.html.

ZCB 3.0 is now available worldwide for a flexible pay-as-you-go cost of US$0.15/GB/month for data transfer and storage on the cloud, with an additional setup and monthly charge of US$4.95 per account for the protection of an unlimited number of Windows desktops and servers. This low subscription based pricing also makes ZCB ideal for one-time data migration projects. ZCB is immediately available for purchase and download from http://www.zmanda.com/cloud-backup.html.

About Zmanda

Zmanda, based in Sunnyvale, California, USA, is the global leader in open source enterprise backup and recovery. The company's products - Amanda Enterprise, Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, and Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) - make it simple and affordable to backup and recover data in an increasingly complex and heterogeneous IT environment. Amanda Enterprise is an enterprise-grade, network backup solution based on Amanda, the world's most popular open source backup and recovery software with more than half a million active installations worldwide. ZRM for MySQL is the first mission-critical backup solution designed specifically for MySQL databases. ZCB is the first Windows backup solution to backup both files and live applications to the Amazon S3 storage cloud. Businesses in more than 55 countries trust Zmanda to protect their corporate data. For more information about Zmanda, please contact zsales@zmanda.com or go to http://www.zmanda.com/.

Agency Contact:
Diane Miller
Robinson Marketing
+1-253-839-9027
diane@robinsonmarketingcorp.com

Singapore Contact:
Ronald Hee
+65-90619098
ronaldhe@pacific.net.sg

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