News
21 April 2010
A-Server opens UK office, appoints local manager and sets up UK datacenter service to help channel partners deliver high value data recovery services to small businesses
Innovative Backup & Data Recovery service (BDR) signs up 200th UK channel partner as demand for business continuity services grow
UK, April 22nd, 2010 A-Server, a leading supplier of data backup and recovery solutions has enhanced its commitment to its channel in the UK with its first office, new country manager and UK operated datacenter environment to help its 200 partners across the country deliver its innovative Backup & Data Recovery service.
A-Server has appointed Ian Smith as its new Business Development Manager for the UK who will be based at new offices in Brighton. A-Server has also launched an office site data backup service hosted at an ISO 270001 accredited Datacenter in the south of England to ensure that critical data remains within the UK at a secure and professionally managed facility.
“The UK is our fastest growing European territory and our partners have provided us with feedback on the requirements to accelerate our growth in the region,” explains Arvid Fossen, Director of Product Management and Marketing for A-Server, “We have had a datacenter for off-site backup in Belgium for many years, but UK customers expressed a desire to have a local facility to ensure data is not off-shored which is a concern for regulatory compliance.”
The A-Server BDR is sold exclusively through the channel and offers partners a complete white label appliance and managed service aimed at helping small and medium sized businesses protect valuable data and servers. The A-Server Backup Data Recovery (BDR) appliance is available in incremental blocks of 1TB and uses Instant Virtualization Technology to recover data faster than traditional drive rebuilds. A-Server also offer a bare metal restore with overnight shipping of a restored-from-last-backup BDR appliance in the event of a major disaster that renders a customers site un-useable such as fire, earthquake or flooding.
“Our channel partners have several Petabytes of data protected with our BDR appliance and we have seen an increase in demand from small and medium business across the UK,” explains Ian Smith, who joined A-Server. Smith was owner & Sales Director for ICS Technology UK Limited, one of IBM's top eServer partners. “With BDR the cost of true ‘enterprise grade’ disaster recovery becomes more affordable, especially as lower cost, higher capacity broadband starts to become widespread.”
A-Server provides training; technical support and UK based datacenter for off-site replication while local channel partners handle implementation and customer relationships. For small business customers this provides the benefit of working with a trusted and local IT supplier but backed by a much larger service provider to ensure the highest possible levels of service. Smith will be holding a number of partner sales training days on the 27th of April in London and 4th of May in Manchester to provide support to the growing UK channel community. More information on the A-Server UK “Open House” can be found here;
www.a-server.com/msp
“The channel likes the idea of our local BDR appliance backed up with an off-site service which provides good recurring revenue stream with very little ongoing commitment in terms of maintenance or support.” Smith Adds.
The addition of the UK datacenter improves the time taken for the initial upload of data from a new client site. For client environments with several terabytes of data across multiple servers, channel partners use the installed BDR appliance to make a full dataset, which is then compressed and copied onto removable media, such as external hard disks. This full backup set is then shipped to the UK datacenter and uploaded into the virtual recovery platform. Subsequent changed or new data at a client site is collected by the local BDR and then siphoned off via any IP enabled network to the UK datacenter, which maintains a secure copy of each client’s environment.
In the event of an evocation of a disaster recovery plan, clients can have multiple options to get up and running. The quickest is to use the Instant Virtualisation technology within the BDR appliance, which will bring live any protected server inside a Virtualised server instance. In the event of loss of a site due to fire or flood, clients can connect to the UK datacenter and access virtualised servers running their application and data over any IP network.
The local BDR can create bare metal restore images to allow servers to be rebuilt or if required, A-Server can ship out the data to channel partners in a bare metal restore format, overnight, to allow partners to rebuild and deliver either single servers or a complete client computing environments within a single day.
The BDR solution is one of the fastest growing backup and recovery services within the UK SMB space.
The solution follows on the success of technology partner Zenith InfoTech which launched a similar service in the US in 2008 that already has 155,000 computers under monitoring and over 15000 installations of its Backup and Data recovery service all sold exclusively via a network of small, local IT service providers.
About A-Server NV
A-Server is the European division of the international group Zenith Infotech. The European headquarters is based in Belgium and has 40 employees. A-Server has a focus on providing standardized and scalable managed IT services to the reseller channel. The service is oriented exclusively to the SME segment.
The portfolio of services is a perfect complement to the activities of the IT reseller. These services are offered through the network operations center in Mumbai, India, where about 600 people support the managed services infrastructure and global customer portfolio.
The services include backup and business continuity solutions for SMEs, Monitoring and Management services for desktops and servers, and more recently the management of an overall SME IT environment via Style Smart Office, an innovative cloud computing solution for network computing. 40.000 sites currently managed by 4.000 IT resellers.
