ATTIX5 partners with Obsidian Systems
With the growing popularity of the Zimbra collaboration suite, data protection specialist ATTIX5 has joined forces with open source specialists, Obsidian Systems. The result is a version of ATTIX5 Backup Professional which is suitable for internet-powered, automated offsite backup and restore for Zimbra users.
According to Petrus Human, technical director at ATTIX5, platform independence is a consistent goal for the company. “The typical backup company would focus on the main players such as Microsoft Exchange as primary targets. At Attix5 we’ve seen the birth of a new cloud giant in Zimbra and as such have partnered with Obsidian to create a specialized third party Zimbra backup offering.” VMware Zimbra is an open source, next-generation email and collaboration software solution. It is designed for web and cloud based collaboration and offers streamlined administration, advanced mobility and both on-premises and hosted cloud deployment options. With around 60 million mailboxes worldwide, it cannot be ignored,” says Human.
Already a user of ATTIX5 Backup Professional within its own environment and reselling the solution to sections of its client base, Obsidian Systems is one of many Zimbra users in South Africa. Managing director Muggie van Staden says this collaboration solution is especially popular in Linux and Mac OS environments. “Many of our clients are using it and very successfully. When the opportunity arose to deliver ATTIX5 BACKUP PRO VERSION 6 for the environment, we jumped at it.”
That is in part owing to its own success with Backup Professional, he continues. “We have a lot of data in a multi-platform environment, running into hundreds of gigabytes. When we moved from open source-based methods of backup to ATTIX5, the performance improvements were substantial. The real difference was apparent in restore times. If you’re in a hurry – and that’s almost always the case when you need to restore data – ATTIX5 just outperforms anything else.”
A technology company itself, van Staden says the real kicker is in having a remote, offsite copy of its backups, courtesy of ATTIX5. “In the past, getting data offsite was a mission and had risks; someone would have to physically get in a vehicle and take the data away.”
That, he agrees, is limiting in this day and age. “The limitation to off-siting electronically was always bandwidth. The compression algorithms of ATTIX5 PRO V6in terms of which only the bits and bytes which have changed are sent over the internet, means a minimal impact on bandwidth – even across hundreds of gigs.”
That’s a value proposition which he says all Zimbra users will appreciate. “Automation of important tasks is becoming a prerequisite in efficiently run businesses,” he notes, adding that companies running open source solutions are often more technologically savvy than others. “That makes ATTIX5 PRO V6an attractive solution; configuration is straightforward, and once done, the system does its backups as scheduled.”
Human says that with the growing popularity of Zimbra, compatibility with Backup Professional is considered an important milestone for ATTIX5. “Wherever there is valuable data, we want to have a solution which is affordable, high performance and bullet proof to make data loss a thing of the past,” he concludes.
