Asigra Aims to Reduce Cloud Service Provider Costs

Asigra is jumping on the "software-defined something" bandwagon with a new software-defined data protection vision that is intended to help cloud services providers build out cloud-based backup and recovery services at a lower cost, enabling even smaller providers to get their foot in the door.

The vision revolves around making it possible to use commodotized infrastructure and vendor-agnostic technologies to provide highly scalable cloud backup storage. Constructing such services can be rather pricey, but Asigra is hoping it can reduce costs and make it feasible for more service providers to get into the market. Company executives are calling it a first in the industry from a backup-focused vendor.

"We have disintermediated the hardware from the storage. It’s a software-defined data protection platform," said Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, in an interview with media at Asigra Partner Summit 2014 in Toronto.

Essentially, the vision will place more responsibility for support on the shoulders of Asigra, enabling storage hardware through software management using FreeBSD.

The goal of this change is to halve the costs of storage hardware for its cloud services provider partners. According to Farajun, storage hardware currently accounts for 30 percent of the total costs of building a cloud-based backup and recovery solution—an area of cloud that is growing.

A couple of years ago, Asigra set out to solve a cost problem for its channel partners. The issue? The cost of Asigra software licenses. A few months after reducing such costs, Asigra started to hear back from channel partners that they had another cost problem—the hardware cost, specifically, Farajun said.

Much of the cost for storage hardware is in the licenses and management software that comes from the vendors. Asigra is aiming to eliminate that, reducing the 30 percent costs to 15 percent. Asigra has built a FreeBSD-based platform that it will release to general availability in early 2015. Some of the features are already available and others will soon come online.

"We built our own stack, essentially," Farajun said.

For partners, this means a reduction in costs, freeing up money that can either be used to increase margins or be reallocated to such things as marketing and lead generation. Either way, if the vision pans out, it's a win-win for partners and cloud services providers looking to partner with Asigra to build out cloud-based backup offerings.