Global data centre service provider Equinix has partnered with Singapore IT company Pantropic Online to provide a new disaster recovery (DR) service for enterprises.
Delivered via Equinix’s Cloud Exchange platform that supports cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the DR service seamlessly integrates private cloud backup with public infrastructure cloud services for recovery.
Clement Goh, managing director of Equinix South Asia, said: “The biggest challenge for most of our customers is that disaster recovery is an expensive insurance. There’s a lot of investment in hardware and software, which companies pay for and hope disaster doesn’t happen.”
He noted that cloud services can help to alleviate such costs without making upfront investments. Besides letting organisations pay for DR services on-demand, Goh said the partnership also addresses the latency and security concerns related to cloud computing through Equinix Cloud Exchange, which offers private direct connections to public cloud providers for better security and performance.
On how Pantropic Online’s DR service differs from others in the market, Kevin Tan, the company’s director, pointed to its ability to help enterprises recover their data and servers beyond offsite backup – as well as its technology.
“Our technology is agentless in nature,” Tan said. “So, there’s no need to install agents on production servers. Instead, we provide a software that talks to the servers and does deduplication before sending data offsite. Management is much easier without agents”.
The DR service also enables enterprises to switch cloud service providers if need be, and offers improvements in recovery times, since companies are essentially recovering their data over a local area network, Tan said.
“Traditional recovery could take hours, depending on the amount of data you have,” he added. “But our technology also has aspects like virtual disaster recovery, where you can do fairly quick automated recoveries of virtual machines.”
Equinix and Pantropic Online are currently in talks with potential customers across industries. “The profiles of customers who may be interested in our service are those with many servers. If they have 50 servers, they won’t have to provide the same number of servers on their DR site,” Tan said.
