Aparavi, a new player in the cloud backup market, has unveiled Active Archive, a solution aimed at the second generation of cloud storage customers. These customers may have more complex requirements than the previous users.
The SaaS-based Active Archive can be used to reduce storage requirements, archive unstructured data, and — with many features designed to ease migration from one storage platform to the next — promote independence for customers across cloud platforms. The Aparavi approach is based on the idea that although unstructured data backup is increasing at a rapid pace, not all of it needs to be stored in the public cloud.
“You don’t need more backup. Jon Calmes, vice-president of business development at the Santa Monica, Calif.-based firm, said that you need a niche tool that is built for the long term.
The platform combines a SaaS console with a local appliance that was built with Aparavi software. It allows organizations to manage backups from their local data source to a target cloud, set retention policies and search for files backed up across clouds. The supported public clouds include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Wasabi, as well as IBM Cloud. The platform also supports Scality, Cloudian, and Caringo on-premises private clouds platforms.
The company allows for local snapshots at source, called checkpoints. However, the company relies on file-based snapshots on an appliance. These are then backed up into the cloud of the customer’s choice. Calmes stated that Aparavi uses a file-based approach to cloud storage management.
You can classify data and create retention policies that allow certain data to disappear after a set amount of time. Or, you can tag files as “legal” and “confidential.” This capability allows organizations to tag data as “personal identity” and help them protect it in accordance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
Organizations can search data using metadata (such as file name or creation date) or full-text content search. Aparavi’s “data pruning” capability automatically removes files and file increments based upon retention policies. This allows organizations to keep their cloud backup sizes under control.
Aparavi was founded in 2016 and came out of stealth mode on October 2017. Support for multiple clouds is one of the new features since the last fall’s test version. Calmes stated that multi-cloud is often misunderstood. “It is difficult to be able to switch at any moment without being charged egress fees.
Calmes stated that customers or managed service providers (MSPs), who work on their behalf, can use Aparavi’s capabilities to assist with a migration to another public cloud. Calmes stated that Aparavi is a tool that allows MSPs to stop data flow to Amazon S3 in Glacier if they want to migrate to Azure and the archive Tier.