Aparavi Debuts New Multi-Cloud Data Retention Platform

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

Aparavi, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based storage software startup, announced the soft launch of its eponymous cloud-enabled long- data retention platform.

Aparavi, from the Latin word apparare, means to prepare and equip. It’s a fitting name for a company whose aim is to equip mid-market firms for long-term and cost-efficient data retention in the cloud era.

While the advent of the cloud computing market and its subsequent growth are credited with revolutionizing the IT industry, these advances came at a cost, said Jonathan Calmes, vice president of business development at Aparavi. Specifically, products based on traditional IT strategies are inflexible, prone to vendor lock-in and fail to keep up with the demands of businesses that are increasingly shifting their storage workloads to the cloud, he said.

“Innovation has broken backup,” Calmes told Enterprise Storage Forum. A confluence of modernized infrastructures, explosive data growth and fragmented, multi-cloud IT environments has made managing storage and maintaining compliance a virtual impossibility for many organizations.

“In these modern architectures, it’s a nightmare,” Calmes said. “Current solutions begin to cause a lot of worry at the C-level.”

To put those executives’ minds at ease and lessen their budgetary burdens, Aparavi’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions offers scalable data retention and protection that works seamlessly across on-premises, hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments. Aparavi’s three-tiered architecture, including a web platform that orchestrates the platform’s other components and enables users to manage their deployments with an intuitive web interface.

Security-conscious CIOs needn’t worry prying eyes, Calmes assured. Although hosted by the company (on-premise deployment options are also available), Aparavi has “no visibility into the data whatsoever,” he said.

Next is the Aparavi software appliance, which can be installed on-premises or spun up in a public or private cloud. It provides file-based snapshot and archive services and acts as a “relationship manager for all data and storage movement,” Calmes added.

Finally, the Aparavi Source Client software gathers system data that is then fed to the appliance, and subsequently to the storage target. It contains an optional Direct Attached Checkpoints feature that allows users to perform quick recoveries for those “oops moments” when a file may have been overwritten or deleted, eliminating the need for an administrator to dig into their archives and unpack the necessary data.

These pieces come together to power some advanced functionality, including the company’s patented Point-in-Time Recovery feature, which allow users to instantly recreate data “from any combination of local or cloud storage,” Calmes said. To help businesses stay out of hot water, compliance-wise, and their cloud costs in check, Aparavi’s Cloud Active Data Pruning technology automatically removes files and portions of files according to the timeframes set by an organization’s data retention policies.

Aparavi’s Multi-Cloud Agile Retention capabilities enable businesses to switch clouds and perform “a trickle migration between cloud providers,” enabling them to lock in savings or meet their compliance or SLA (service-level agreement) requirements without incurring expensive egress fees, said Calmes. Finally, to combat vendor lock-in, now and in the future, Aparavi uses an open data format.

Aparavi is available now supports Linux and Windows. Pricing starts at three cents per gigabyte per month or $999 per year for 3GB of protected source data (the first terabyte is free). Supported clouds include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack, with Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud compatibility in the works, said Calmes.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.