Druva offers remote backup for business laptops

Data protection firm Druva is bringing application-aware de-duplication technology to its laptop backup software, greatly reducing the bandwidth and storage capacity required and allowing remote backup of a company's laptop fleet.

Druva's inSync 4.0, available immediately, is designed to provide backup protection of corporate data held on laptops, which tend to connect to the company network infrequently and often at irregular intervals.

This has become a major issue, according to Druva chief executive Jaspreeet Singh, because as much as 38 per cent of corporate data could be stored on laptop hard drives, and many businesses admit they cannot back them up.

"Users with laptops hop networks frequently, so the old methods of incremental network backup just don't work any more," he said.

InSync addresses this problem by providing near continuous data protection, with the inSync agent sending back changes to a central repository whenever the laptop has an internet connection.

In this respect, inSync is similar to Mozy's online backup service, launched earlier this year. But, while Mozy backs up to its own datacentre, inSync operates from an on-premise server behind the customer's firewall.

Druva has also introduced an application-aware de-dupe technology that significantly reduces the bandwidth and storage required for backups.

It does this by applying de-duplication globally across every laptop user, according to Singh. This means that a specific file or email message will be backed up just once, no matter how many users have a copy on their system.

Administrators can also limit how much of each laptop's bandwidth and CPU resources the inSync agent can use so that it does not get in the way of the employee's work.

InSync supports a number of restore methods, including self-service recovery of individual documents by users. For larger recovery sets, administrators can create a password protected archive and send it to the user, and if the worst happens a bare-metal recovery CD can be created to restore the entire laptop.

Druva's inSync 4.0 runs on Windows or Linux servers and inside a virtual machine, with a one-off fee of £500 for the server software itself. End-user licences are about £60 per user for the first year, with subsequent years charged at £12 per user.