Seagate Renames EVault Data Protection Cloud, Preps Solution For Enterprise

Seagate Wednesday expanded its data protection cloud to add scalability for enterprise customers, and in the process dropped its EVault moniker to reflect the change.

Seagate's new Hybrid Cloud Data Protection solution portfolio offers a 400 percent increase in performance along with scalability into the petabyte range, said David Flesh, vice president of marketing for cloud systems and electronics for the Cupertino, Calif.-based storage vendor.

The solution also can be used by large corporations to build private data protection infrastructures, Flesh told CRN.

[Related: Arcserve Integrates New Arcserve Cloud Into Data Protection Solution]

That increase in scalability is a huge change for customers, Flesh said.

"We're going from multi-terabyte implementations to multi-petabyte implementations," he said. "We're providing rack-scale capabilities. We had great adoption in remote offices and branch offices, but our vaults did not scale enough for central office solutions."

That new emphasis on enterprise customers led Seagate to drop the EVault name from its cloud data protection solution. Seagate in 2007 acquired EVault, making it the center of the company's cloud-based data protection solution. Seagate in 2008 rolled EVault and other data protection services into a new company called i365, but in 2011 restored the EVault name.

Despite the name change, the Hybrid Cloud Data Protection solution keeps EVault's emphasis on simplicity, Flesh said. "But we're now letting customers add capacity via new enclosures and racks," he said. "The software sees the new capacity and automatically adds the subscribers to the capacity. This makes it easy for customers to scale the cloud."

Seagate has done a good job of expanding its cloud-based data protection solution, said Mike Piltoff, senior vice president for strategic marketing at Champion Solutions Group, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider that has been active with EVault for a couple years.

"The new scalability is a big deal," Piltoff told CRN. "This is important for enterprise customers that have data in a lot of repositories."

Piltoff said that EVault traditionally has been a solution with a low-cost, simple way to offer professional services for implementation.

"Seagate's cloud allows us to provide a disaster recovery solution that meets application-specific SLAs," Piltoff said. "We can set up a disaster recovery solution in the cloud that waits to be used based on SLAs so we can help customers adjust their backup and recovery costs. This is important. Usually when customers do their own disaster recovery solution or work with MSPs, they get an all-or-nothing SLA. But a lot of applications don't need a four-hour SLA."

Piltoff also likes the auto-discovery that Seagate adds to disaster recovery with the Hybrid Cloud Data Protection solution.

"We often meet with clients looking for disaster recovery studies in relation to SLAs, but who never wait for the studies to be complete," he said. "So they don't move to the next step. But Seagate is simple. The solution can adjust the SLA up or down to for quick implementation."

Moving away from the EVault name was also the right move, Piltoff said.

"EVault has a great track record," he said. "But Seagate is a giant in the industry. Customers are reassured when they see the Seagate name. And some larger accounts prefer the Seagate name."

The Seagate Hybrid Cloud Data Protection, and EVault before it, is a key part of the data protection offering of Iron Mountain, said Jeremy Zhang, director of product management for the Boston-based storage and information management company.

Iron Mountain, which in 2011 sold its organic data protection business to Autonomy, also provides the data center on which the Seagate solution is hosted, Zhang said.

The fact that Iron Mountain hosts the Seagate solution and resells it to customers makes the relationship between the two strategic, Zhang told CRN.

"Trust is important," he said. "Iron Mountain touches more data centers than anyone on the planet. We are keeping over 80 million tapes for customers worldwide. When customers want to move away from tape to the cloud or to on-premise solutions, we have the relationships they can trust."

Also new in the Hybrid Cloud Data Protection solution is Seagate Data Management Services, a professional services offering to help customers find the best place to store their data and what tiers of storage are best for their environments, Flesh said.

The Seagate Data Management Services are available directly from Seagate initially, but Seagate has plans to let partners offer them in the future, he said. "We're looking to make sure we get it right in terms of policies, and will expand to the channel later," Flesh said.

The Hybrid Cloud Data Protection solution is expected to be available later this month.

PUBLISHED JULY 15, 2015