Staples Announces Backup And Restore Services

Staples Advantage announced Tuesday the launch of two new network service solutions aimed at small-to-midsize businesses, ThriveSafe and ThriveSave.

Staples Advantage is the business-to-business division of Staples, Inc and Thrive Networks is its IT network services business. According to the company, "ThriveSafe and ThriveSave provide a unified business continuity and data protection platform exclusively for SMB, with all of the necessary components built into an agentless platform." The two new services use a combination of a RAID-based appliance and cloud-based off-site storage.

ThriveSave can backup data for all servers, including MS Exchange and MS SQL databases, and network-attached storage, to an onsite appliance and scheduled offsite backup to provide data protection including disaster recovery. Backups are incremental, and are done on a scheduled basis, which can be as frequent as every fifteen minutes. The cloud backup can be used to restore data. Replication to the cloud can be set, throttling to minimize WAN bandwidth during business hours and using maximum bandwidth during non-business hours.

ThriveSafe includes ThriveSafe local and off-site backup, plus one-click server failover. According to the company, when a server fails, ThriveSafe can restore an image to a backup server or to the ThriveSafe Appliance.

ThriveSave is intended for organizations that already have a business continuity solution in place.

The new services give companies "back-up, one-click rapid restores and disaster recovery so they can be up and running within minutes of a data loss," said Jim Lippie, president of Thrive Networks. According to the company, the image will be backup image typically boots up and is available in about fifteen minutes.

"ThriveSave and ThriveSafe are good for any business looking to automate their backup, be compliant with industry regulations, and have business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities," said Lippie. The services are intended primarily for companies with 20 to 250 employees. "We serve all industries. Most of our clients are professional services organizations including financial services, and companies in high tech and bio-tech."

According to Lippie, the company previously offered ThriveVault, "a traditional online backup at the server and desktop level. ThriveSafe and ThriveSave completely automate the data backup process; there are no tapes to swap. There's a local appliance for fast restores when needed, and we provide business continuity and disaster recovery."

ThriveSave and ThriveSafe join the still-growing ranks of appliance, cloud, managed services and SaaS vendors currently offering hybrid premises/cloud backup and restore capabilities, such as DroboPro FS, Ctera), Backup My Info!, Geminare and Moxy 2XProtect.

"For this target market segment, there's a big need to have rapid data recovery and restoration that can be measured in hours or minutes. In the past, this has only been available for larger SMBs and for enterprises," commented Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst of the StorageIO Group. "Staples is known for its 'big red Easy Button,' and caters to this market segment. If these services can let small-to-midsize businesses not lose data, and be back up and running in under an hour, easily and affordably, that's a 'big red Easy Button' for this growing business requirement."

ThriveSafe and ThriveSave will work with Windows, Mac, Linux and any other operating systems, according to Lippie. Pricing is tiered, based on capacity, which starts at 250GB up to 4TB, starting at around $275/month for save-only, $350 for save-and-failover.