R1Soft apparently has carved out a niche among service providers seeking a bit more than what traditional backup technology provides. The division of BBS Technologies Inc. offers continuous data protection (CDP) software for Linux and Windows servers. Here’s some background.

After the first backup, CDP takes periodic data snapshots. The user can schedule those snapshots — every 15 minutes, for example. The approach gives customers numerous data recovery points in contrast to a daily backup.

Hosting and colocation companies have taken to R1Soft’s backup method.

New York Internet, a company that provides colocation, Web hosting and e-mail hosting among other services, recently deployed R1Soft’s CDP solution. Phillip Koblence, vice president of operations at NYI, said his company offers R1Soft to customers as an added-value on top of their existing infrastructure redundancy, backing up Windows and Linux servers as well as MySQL databases.

Koblence said NYI had been looking for “a partner to assist us with what we are offering from a backup standpoint,” noting that he came across R1Soft while researching what other service providers were using.

R1Soft reports that 85 percent of its installed base is in the hosting/cloud/ASP area, while 10 percent is in SMB, hospitals, schools, and government. The remaining 5 percent is in the VAR/MSP space. The company sees the VAR/MSP segment, along with branch office backup for servers, as its next growth market.

“We see a lot of interest from VARs and MSPs,” said David Wartell, vice president and founder of R1Soft.

Previously, the company’s products had not been formulated for the VAR and MSP market, he explained. The company’s CDP Enterprise Edition 2.0, for example, is not well suited for a branch office or an MSP that has a slow wide-area network connection to a backup repository.

Now, R1Soft is adding features to CDP Enterprise 3.0 that will compensate for customers’ slow WAN connections. A portable Disk Safe feature will let MSPs create a customer’s initial replica on a USB drive, which can then be driven to an off-site backup center. That method saves MSPs from having to do the first full backup over a slow line. With the initial replica in place, periodic snapshots capture data that changed since the previous replication. Those changes are moved over the slow line, rather than a full backup.

At the moment, only CDP Standard Edition includes the portal Disk Safe feature and 3.0 technology, according to R1Soft. CDP Enterprise will come out with Disk Safe and 3.0 technology this summer.

Backup and disaster recovery is an increasingly common service provider offering these days. A few recent examples can be seen here and here. An MSP that has customers with demanding recovery point objectives may want to look into CDP as part of its backup plan.

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