According to Vas Srinivasan, Vice President of Marketing for Sonasoft, his company is taking a unique approach in its small-to-midsized business (SMB) backup-and-recovery solution. In a recent conversation with our editors, Srinivasan, Sonasoft President and CEO Andy Khanna, and Vice President of Engineering and CTO Bilal Ahmed described their company’s SonaSafe for SQL Server as a “neo-CDP” solution, explaining that it combines replication with backup and recovery functions to provide data protection with minimal latency. The approach isn’t being used by other vendors in the SMB space; Sonasoft’s competitors provide backup and recovery or replication solutions, but no one else provides a combination solution.
Sonasoft has chosen to base its solution on transactional replication, which eliminates the need to perform a restore of a full backup in the event of a disaster. Instead, administrators can restore only the changes that occur after a specific point in time, so the restore can happen in a matter of minutes instead of taking hours or even days. Although SonaSafe does require some downtime to perform its failover function, the time that data is unavailable is minimized.
This integration of replication with the backup-and-restore solution is important to SMB customers, Srinivasan says, because they often want the kind of continuous data protection (CDP) solution that a large enterprise requires, but they need to provide that high level of data availability at a much lower cost than enterprise-level CDP solutions. Sonasoft executives told us that SMBs represent as much as 80 percent of the backup-and-recovery market, so they feel that their unique offering puts them in a good position to grow their company over the next year. “We don’t aim to compete with the enterprise vendors,” says Srinivasan. “We want to get the market share we deserve, and we’ll earn it.”
The company will be looking for this growth following the release of the latest version of SonaSafe for SQL Server coupled with a shift from direct sales to channel distribution of its products. In addition, the company plans continued upgrades to its products based on ongoing customer feedback. Sonasoft cultivates its customer relationships by providing personalized customer care, and the company stresses that it intends to be sure that its level of customer service remains high even as the company grows. --Dawn Cyr
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