Brennan IT launches managed backup service

IT services company Brennan IT has launched a managed backup and recovery service to complement its infrastructure-as-a-service.

The service offers customers a managed backup and recovery service between a customer's site and Brennan IT's data centres in Sydney and Brisbane.

The service is priced either as a fixed monthly fee (for a managed service) or a pay-as-you-go service priced per gigabyte transferred across the network.

The service requires Brennan IT to deploy and manage a WAN (wide area network) link between a customer's data centre and Brennan IT's data centres in Sydney and Brisbane.

Brennan IT engineers then come on-site with the customer to install and configure a data deduplication appliance and backup server, and set up replication between these systems and similar appliances based in Brennan IT's data centre over the WAN link.

Once up and running, customers pay for regular backups to the Brennan IT data centre under either a predictable monthly fee or pay-as-you-go model.

The price of the latter can be based on a per gigabyte of data stored and transferred across the network, with a base price of 50c per gigabyte of data stored.

Nick McMenemy, head of marketing and product management at Brennan IT said customers can also choose to adjust these rates based on file type and level of protection. So while they might pay one rate per gigabyte for Exchange files protected by RAID 5, for example, they might pay a higher rate per gigabyte for Oracle database files protected by RAID 10.

McMenemy said it only seemed natural that customers using Brennan IT's Infrastructure-as-a-service would be interested in contracting Brennan to manage their backup and archiving needs.

He said the service will prove particularly attractive to organisations that have deployed VMware's vSphere4 virtualisation software in-house - as Brennan IT will be able to "replicate or archive that data" to its data centre with relative ease. Brennan IT can backup either the whole virtual machine or the image of the virtual machine (a VMDK file or virtual machine disk format), he said.

Brennan is also offering "money-backed SLAs" to give customers greater confidence that Brennan can meet the chosen service levels associated with each tier of storage.

McMenemy said the service is based on products supplied from a range of vendors that include HP, EMC and Data Domain, but the customer will probably never know what technologies are being used.

"It's a service," he said. "We are selling a Ferrari, not a chassis from x company and wheels from y company."