The Lochristi-based firm, which also has operations in Pittsburgh in the US, is promoting and supporting its ARCA-based disaster recovery cloud-based backup service via Core Consultancy, its UK partner.
ARCA stands for Advanced Recovery Continuity Appliance and is a network-attached storage device for Windows Servers preloaded with backup, recovery and virtualisation software aimed at small to medium enterprises (SMEs).
According to Sharad Saggar, Core Consultancy's managing director, the cloud-based backup appliance gives smaller firms the ability to recover everything from a single file, database or email message, right up to a full production server, in just a few minutes.
Interestingly, the ARCA service is billed as offering a `bare-metal' restore to dissimilar hardware.
Bare-metal restore is where the backed-up data is available in a form which restoration can be to a computer system without the need for previously installed software or an operating system.
Essentially the back-up contains the complete operating system but, says Core Consultancy, the machine to be restored upon can be a completely different hardware platform.
Unlike competing cloud-based backup providers, A-Server is not routing its backup data calls directly to its own servers. Instead the company uses service providers in each country who use one or more ARCA-Vault servers, which then accept backup calls from ARCA appliances at customers' premises.
Each ARCA appliance protects between four to 10 local servers depending on configuration, whilst each ARCA-Vault can manage up to 25 remote ARCA site appliances.
Saggar said that he and his team at Core Consultancy developed their own online backup solution in 2003, but, over the last few years, the volume of data requiring offsite backup and the need for faster restoration of both individual files and entire servers has increased rapidly.
"Demand for Core Data Safe (the company's existing online backup service) is growing steadily, and we felt that an investment in ARCA would allow us to offer an enhanced range of features, whilst moving away from overnight backups to a continuous data protection model based on 15 minute increments", he said.
Core Consultancy has set up ARCA-Vaults at its datacentre and has migrated around a quarter of its clients to the new platform, Saggar said.
"We ran extensive testing on ARCA over the last few months and its ability to recover production servers in less than 30 minutes from a complete hardware failure is impressive", he said.
"The continual data protection technology means that overnight backup windows are no longer required, which is especially useful for clients who require 24/7 access to IT systems", he added.
Saggar went on to say that he believes that, although the cloud-based backup market has a lot of new entrants, the majority fail to offer true business continuity.
Many of these new cloud-based backup services, he explained, just dump data from a client's server onto a big virtual harddrive hosted somewhere on the internet.
As a result, he said, whilst getting a single file is relatively easy, recovering an entire critical email or application server or quickly re-establishing an IT infrastructure in the event of a site relocation due to fire or flood is almost impossible.
Saggar and his team said they have built additional layers of integration into the base ARCA cloud-based backup solution including two factor authentication and annual disaster recovery tests to ensure each client is fully protected.
As a result, the cloud-based backup service is claimed to be ISO 17799 and BS 7799 compliant.