OffsiteDataSync
The 'Always On' Experts

The creative design team at Lafayette 148 NY—a women’s fashion company based out of New York, N.Y. and Shantou China had just given the finishing touches to their fall collection, when the TV flashed warnings about an approaching hurricane, “Sandy”. No one in the East Coast or at Lafayette had anticipated the magnitude of the super-storm, and in a few short hours, lower Manhattan plunged into chaos with the raging storm and rain shutting down electricity, the internet and the entire city. While many NY firms faced a potentially lengthy power outage and the prospect of a long recovery, Lafayette 148 New York trusted OffsiteDataSync to keep operations running in a ‘business as usual’ way.

“Many companies did not understand the value of IT until Hurricane Sandy,” said Kinsen Siu, Vice President, Global Security and Emergency Planning, Lafayette 148 New York. “We work in fashion, which is extremely competitive, and our employees in China wanted access to data. They did not want to hear any excuses. It sounds callous, but that is the nature of our industry and why it is so important to be always-on. Downtime can easily cost us between half a million and a million dollars per day. Downtime can also damage our reputation.”

Many companies like Lafayette that strive to ensure business continuity in times of natural or man-made disasters find their silver lining in the state-of-the-art disaster recovery service offered by OffsiteDataSync. “Our Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offerings assure complete system-wide continuity with hot failover and failback in seconds or minutes depending on need along with file-based recovery options,” begins Matthew Chesterton, CEO, OffsiteDataSync. “When disasters loom we provide confidence and trust that corporate data is protected and critical systems are and will be available. We protect enterprise environments running on-premises or hybrid cloud workloads by providing hot-site failover with burstable CPU, RAM and tiered storage.”

During his tenure as a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Chesterton foresaw the need to mitigate risks associated with disk crashes, power failures, human error, and natural disasters before they turned into big business losses. The inception of OffsiteDataSync was a natural progression in Chesterton's goal to assist organizations in preventing financial disasters caused by data loss and unavailability of key applications.

OffsiteDataSync takes extraordinary preemptive technical measures to ensure a consistent, reliable experience with dynamically available resources during times of customer misfortune. Coupled with the ability to deliver near-zero data loss and application availability with little or no downtime, organizations are shifting to the DRaaS model that OffsiteDataSync delivers. Gone are the days of purchasing redundant hardware and building or renting data center space. OffsiteDataSync provides robust options for even the most demanding workloads with SSD based storage performance options based on Nimble, Cisco UCS technology and LAN speed connectivity to hybrid cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google. “From straightforward and affordable onsite/offsite data protection to customized solutions for DRaaS and IaaS, we offer a full portfolio of technology options to protect the modern IT landscape before disaster strikes and maintain production-level performance when required,” adds Chesterton.

Top-of-the-line Solutions

The company has been a pioneer in redefining RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives), full-scale DR testing, and assisting customers to spot process and technical glitches when a disaster occurs. “Organizations need to have appropriately aligned RTOs and RPOs,” says Chesterton. “It sounds technical but it boils down to clearly defining business objectives, and that comes from the top down. Identifying the cost of downtime for an application or suite of applications is key, and our team has been trained to isolate and identify these objectives. From there, we identify and implement the right-fit solution to address the business objectives.”

OffsiteDataSync delivers availability for the enterprise through the only colocation, carrier-neutral Tier IV Gold rated Switch SUPERNAP data centers headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada

Chesterton explains the need for a reliable disaster recovery plan through a recent example of one of world’s largest airlines, Delta, which witnessed the malfunction of a critical power control module at Delta’s Technology Command Center. As this happened, critical systems and network equipment failed to switch over to backup servers, and the entire command system failed. “If we had an opportunity to ask Delta executives a year ago what the business objectives for uptime of critical applications was I am willing to bet the answer would have been radically different from what the answer would be today,” adds Chesterton.

IDC, Gartner and other industry analysts predict the DRaaS market will continue on a fast growth trajectory with some interesting turns along the way over the next few years. Here, OffsiteDataSync is uniquely positioning themselves to be a driving force. The company is planning to deliver its DRaaS and IaaS platforms on a network of direct 1GB and 10GbE connections from many major cloud providers to its global footprint of data centers. Ultimately this will enable DRaaS and IaaS at LAN speeds using OffsiteDataSync for hybrid-cloud workloads. “This is one example of the innovative mindset we foster and it is the reason we are consistently ahead of the market,” beams Chesterton. “This offering is targeted for availability through the world’s highest rated colocation data centers and technology ecosystems, Switch SUPERNAP data centers, by December of 2016 and we have plans for the same in the Switch SUPERNAP data centers in Grand Rapids, Milan, and Bangkok as 2017 progresses.

Productive Partnerships

OffsiteDataSync collaborates with the best data backup and recovery software developers in the world—including Veeam, StorageCraft, and Zerto. With a diverse portfolio of backup and DRaaS service offerings, the company can offer a range of RTOs & RPOs at defined value points. One of the most demanded OffsiteDataSync DRaaS solutions is based on Veeam Cloud Connect. “Our partnership with Veeam is a success story in and of itself. Our organizations work well together and complement each other perfectly. The Veeam name has become the go-to platform on the market today and for good reason–it is reliable, effective and intuitive,” asserts Chesterton. “We have a close working relationship with Veeam in all aspects.”

OffsiteDataSync is working closely with StorageCraft to launch their Cloud Service Provider model and was designated as a StorageCraft Platinum partner in October 2016. “We are excited about our partnership with StorageCraft and the synergy our organizations have together. Our 2017 strategy with StorageCraft will continue to strengthen our DRaaS positioning and leverage the unique strengths we both have in the marketplace.” noted Chesterton.

In addition, OffsiteDataSync has a strong partnership with backup storage leader ExaGrid, whose disk-based backup storage appliances are deployed at onsite and offsite customer locations internationally. The two organizations launched the only ExaGrid-as-a-Service platform available in the market in 2106. ExaGrid-as-a- Service leverages ExaGrid’s exceptional and powerful backup storage appliances, featuring a unique landing zone and scale-out architecture. OffsiteDataSync’s cloud-based ExaGrid targets are hosted in OffsiteDataSync’s secure SUPERNAP facilities and provide outstanding uptime, reliability, and protection for large amounts of data. The ExaGrid-as-a-Service offering supports Veeam, StorageCraft, Zerto, and other backup software applications installed onsite at a customer's location.

OffsiteDataSync alignment with Switch SUPERNAP, the world’s leading data center ecosystem, is a key component in how it achieves unparalled data security. “Switch SUPERNAP data centers are simply the best and most secure in the world. We have committed to delivering our services from the SUPERNAP data centers located in Las Vegas and Grand Rapids and in early 2017 our portfolio of services will be available in SUPERNAP facilities in Milan, Italy, and Bangkok, Thailand,” remarked Chesterton. “Data security is number one. When prospects learn that we can deliver from a global footprint of SUPERNAP facilities, including the Uptime Institute certified Tier-IV Gold SUPERNAP in Las Vegas, they understand our commitment to security is second to none and our dedication to delivering the best is obvious.”

Safeguarding the Future

OffsiteDataSync’s market positioning, delivery of technology, and partnerships have set a clear benchmark in the global disaster recovery landscape. With a passionate team of world-class professionals, they will continue to define DRaaS delivery and how it is thought about in the marketplace. The company attracts a young and ambitious workforce with free-flowing ideas balanced with senior experience and seasoned experts. “We are a group of motivated individuals, passionate about what we do,” adds Chesterton. OffsiteDataSync has also ingrained a sense of discipline in every aspect of the organization–from sales process to data center management processes and metrics. “Our sense of discipline wasn’t overnight; it is a part of who we are and how we’ve developed over the past 17 years,” asserts Chesterton.

“Our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, powered by the likes of VMware vCloud Director, Microsoft Azure Pack, and Cisco UCS technology, allows adoption of both hybrid or fully hosted cloud solutions,” adds Chesterton. “Our IaaS platform will continue to grow as the definition of DRaaS evolves. What we are doing today will look a little different as IaaS continues to push the market into private and hybrid cloud adoption.”

OffsiteDataSync is looking forward to the future. “We want to enhance the ability and reach of our development team so we can continue to scale at the pace we have the past 3 years. The development, engineering and sales teams will continue to drive innovation and set the tone in the DRaaS marketplace in coming years,” elucidates Chesterton. OffsiteDataSync prides themselves at being a step ahead in time, and a force that drives technology.