SystemFlip

Managing Director Simon Ponsford has held senior positions in datacentre and cloud technology businesses, including Chief Technical Architect in one of the leading global disaster recovery businesses. He is an information technology entrepreneur and is internationally recognised as a thought-leader and expert in cloud technology, disaster recovery and low energy computing. Simon became convinced that current disaster recovery products did not serve customers well. He saw an opportunity to develop a single, integrated product that would deliver both on-site recovery benefits and disaster recovery which would be simple to install and use and would offer cost savings. He began by evaluating all the current online backup and disaster recovery (DR) products on the market. He found that customers typically needed to purchase two separate backup and DR products from different vendors. This means that to recover, first a DR solution needs to be invoked, and then once live, the latest backup restored. The result is that failover takes many hours or even days to complete. As backup and DR solutions come from different vendors this means both need to replicate the data offsite, resulting in high bandwidth requirements. The two product types are difficult to get to work together and data storage costs are high because data has to be stored twice - once for each application. Discussions with IT professionals revealed that whilst backup and DR are essential in a responsibly run business to provide protection from major disasters such as fire and flood, the everyday disasters such as a single server failure, (e.g. a RAID controller dying, or a motherboard fault) or cyber-attack are not covered by traditional backup and DR solutions. If hardware is faulty, restoring a backup will not help and invoking DR is not a good idea when all other servers are operational. Instead, an on-site recovery solution is needed. Aware of the drawbacks of existing products for mid-market companies, he realised that a wide range of technical ...