Dell Acquires AppAssure

In a world of social media and real-time news, the world remembers businesses that lost their edge because they lost data or couldn’t recover data fast enough. This makes reliable data protection more important now than ever before, yet traditional backup solutions are not architected for today’s 24/7 virtualized and cloud environments. Customers who face this dilemma typically deploy expensive replicated solutions to attain the flexibility and recovery speeds their businesses demand. Next-generation data protection solutions are just now becoming available that combine the best of both worlds to provide flexible, cost-effective solutions for foolproof data protection and fast recovery times.

Today we acquired AppAssure to help Dell customers modernize their data protection strategies and keep up with the pace of their organization. AppAssure, located in Reston, Virginia, is a leader in complete server, data and application protection for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures. The acquisition helps Dell take another big step in our enterprise solutions strategy and deliver our Fluid Data architecture that automatically and intelligently protects and optimizes data protection and recovery.

Dell is delivering next-generation data protection by investing in development and acquiring game-changing IP like AppAssure. AppAssure unified backup, archive and replication solution guarantees near instant and 100 percent reliable application recovery from customers’ servers to their datacenter and their cloud. Unlike traditional solutions AppAssure is application aware, with built-in intelligence both about the data and the application. It is integrated with storage solutions like snapshots that can quickly capture changed data as frequently as virtual environments need, dedupe and compress this incremental snapshot, and recover it quickly for any slice of time. This granular intelligence allows users to restore an entire application or a single file – like a mailbox, or even that important email you accidentally deleted – in minutes.

AppAssure’s ability to protect entire applications enables service providers and enterprises to adopt a “cloud model” to deliver fast, reliable and secure data protection. Using its very simple, single management “pane of glass,” customers can verify the reliability of the recovery, backup to any physical or virtual machine from any platform, providing customers the Fluid Data promise of the right data in the right place at the right time for the right cost. Existing customers will see an immediate benefit day one, for example, by being able to back up an EqualLogic array to a Compellent solution and recover it from anywhere.

Dell will extend the benefit of AppAssure across our enterprise solutions and services portfolio. Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture as we’ve done with our other acquired IP, including EqualLogic, Compellent and the Fluid File System. Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites.

Organizations today should be recognized for delivering excellent products or service, not for their data outages. We believe AppAssure innovative backup technology is going to help keep our customers moving forward and we’re excited about this new addition to Dell storage family.

About the Author: Darren Thomas