By Zetta Guest Blog

By now, you’ve likely seen the news that we’ve released the latest version of our cloud backup and DR solution with the Zetta DataProtect 4.5 release in August and, more recently, version 4.6. Here’s a quick recap of the key highlights:

“Late” to the Party

You’re probably saying to yourself, welcome to the image backup party, Zetta.net! And you’re partly right. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. Yes, we could have come to the image backup party sooner. But let me share why we didn’t jump in so quickly.

First, let me start off by sharing a few key details about our solution for those of you who don’t know us.

In a nutshell, we provide complete cloud+local backup and DR for files, databases and server images, with built-in WAN acceleration that allows us to protect true “enterprise-scale” data sets. We’ve had customers with hefty available bandwidth move 5TB a day to our cloud!

Also, our solution doesn’t require an appliance or a local staging drive to back up your customers’ data. Really. Our appliance-free approach, combined with WAN-optimization technologies, allows our MSP partners to deliver faster, more efficient, and lower-overhead backup and recovery services to their customers.

No-Appliance Server Image Backup

So, back to why we’re a bit late to the party. Well, we could have followed the approach of some of our competitors by bundling a third-party server image backup service into our solution to play in the game sooner. And we did look at several options! What we found, though, is that all third-party solutions are written in a way that assumes that the backups will be written to a tightly coupled, local storage system– they simply weren’t going to work with our “direct-to-cloud, no appliance required” mantra.

In the end, we decided to build a solution that follows the rest of our existing solutions–one that optimizes cloud efficiency, is easy to manage, and lowers overall costs for our partners and customers.

So what’s the bottom line for MSPs? You can quickly add new revenue streams by offering the first appliance-free, WAN-accelerated, easy-to-deploy server image backup solution, as well as reduce the time and cost of managing hardware at your customers’ sites.

And if your customers need to recover images, they can do so immediately from anywhere they have an Internet connection, rather than waiting for a replacement appliance–with the ability to select any recovery target regardless of whether it’s a physical or virtual platform.

Increased revenue, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty–it’s a win-win.  

Art Ledbetter is director of channels at Zetta. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.