Seagate and i365 Bring Microsoft DPM to the Cloud

There are plenty of resellers out there running Microsoft Windows on their servers but Linux on their storage appliance – making it a pain to protect all that data, let alone back it up to a cloud for disaster recovery. Well, now i365, a Seagate company, has announced a partnership with Microsoft in the form of EVault for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, designed to give channel partners a solution to do just that. Interested?

I’ve talked about i365’s approach to hybrid cloud storage here, but the general gist is that their EVault product is a backup solution designed to move Seagate from traditional hardware manufacturer to cloud services provider.

In this case, i365 is providing a Dell-built all-in-one appliance that enables on-premises storage and protection that automatically backs up to Seagate’s cloud cloud, according to the press release – and the Microsoft deal means they can extend those services, by way of Data Protection Manager (DPM), to Windows applications and data as easily as they can to Linux, Novell NetWare, or even VMware environments.

In this blogger’s humble opinion, this kind of solution is what’s going to let VARs make money from the cloud. Even as the SaaS market experiences commodification, the resellers that flourish are going to be the ones who can leverage the cloud to provide more value to existing deployments – like, say, Windows servers and Linux storage appliances.

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