With data centres in Indianapolis, Indiana and Michigan, Baseline currently protects 123TB of customer data with Redstor.
Bruce expects that figure to grow significantly now Redstor offers a highly competitive solution that is quick to demo, easy to sell and manage - and readily available on a free trial.
He said: “Baseline has a plan to onboard customers in thousands or hundreds of thousands. You simply cannot do that by filling in forms. There has to be automation.
“Having the ordering part of the onboarding process set up on the system is fantastic. So a customer can pay with a credit card, get access to the product and self-enable protection of G Suite and 365 data. That moves us a considerable step forward.
“Redstor is ahead of the competition. Most products are based on a someone-is-going-to-help-you-get-sorted model.
“But with massive audiences, that model simply can’t scale and is not a great customer experience, especially when time-zone differences make it a cumbersome process.
“So many aspects of the world now are self-serve. You set up yourself, or the technology does everything automatically, leaving you to get on with your job. The MSP gives the high touch or validates certain things, but trying out a solution should be automated.”
Onboarding on-prem devices can be an arduous task for IT teams.
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Bruce said: “Installing anything on multiple servers typically takes time. For Redstor to streamline that process through an admin user, who can see all the servers on a network, is another huge step.
“The last customer I supported had 84 servers. Imagine installing and configuring those 84 times.”
Redstor’s self-service portal enables Baseline to procure, deploy and manage customers' backup and archive data fast. Creating upsell opportunities is easier with a comprehensive platform that offers invaluable insight into entire data estates.
The removal of multiple point solutions for backup and recovery, data search, archiving and disaster recovery also improves customer satisfaction and retention. Bruce said: “Having a single control centre to manage customer data remotely and a single vendor, rather than multiple ones for separate solutions, is extremely important for any MSP looking to scale rapidly. This is a crucial component of Baseline’s plans to market to waves of tens of thousands of customers. Redstor’s technology enables that process to be a reality. “I know of another backup provider that got into bed with a third-party vendor to provide archiving and the immediate feedback that they got from customers was ‘the last thing I want to do is add another piece of software that has a completely different interface’.”
If live data is lost, Redstor eliminates downtime by enabling users to live-stream whatever they need to carry on working.
This is done with InstantData™, a unique technology that presents a server (to the user) as fully recovered while a restore is still in process.
So, should an organisation suffer a hardware failure, a malware or ransomware attack, or any other activity which renders them unable to operate – disruption is no longer an issue.
With a simple opex-only model, Redstor eliminates the need for resellers to install, manage or maintain appliances.
Bruce said: “For many types of customers getting rid of on-prem hardware absolutely makes sense. Streaming is great where there is really good bandwidth, but that’s not always the case outside of big metropolitan areas for huge companies with a lot of data.” Redstor, however, uses smart compression, encrypting data at source, deduplicating and compressing it. Not only does this greatly reduce the size of each file transmitted, making it bandwidth efficient, but only changed data is transmitted and stored – radically reducing costs. “The changed-block tracking process that Redstor uses lends itself to a skinnier bandwidth,” said Bruce.
“We have had customers where we’ve been able to get more protection without having to buy new storage servers. In most cases we have moved them from 14-day retentions to 30-day retentions with either the same or less space taken on the storage server. When you expand that out over 90 days Redstor can take up as little as one-tenth of the storage of some providers. “Reasonably priced storage is in the 5-to-20 cents per GB region so dropping from 20TB to 1.5GB is substantial money. You are not just avoiding the purchase of a new disc, you are no longer looking to buy a whole new storage server. That could be 20,000 or 30,000 dollars that you have offset.”
The capability to identify additional revenue opportunities with Redstor’s comprehensive insight dashboards is not lost on Bruce.
Clients relish the cost savings of an archiving solution that frees up primary storage space by offloading rarely accessed data to the cloud. With Redstor, archived data remains instantly accessible and searchable - and there are no fees to retrieve files. Bruce said: “On the Redstor web console I could see that 56-per-cent of one customer’s data had not been accessed in the last three months. To relieve half his storage is of massive value. “Think about it. ‘This is my NetApp filer that I just paid half a million dollars for and you are telling me you can free up 50-per-cent of it for nothing!’.
With a platform designed for multi-tenancy and an easy-to-use, self-service portal, Redstor offers complete billing visibility and the ability to manage account limits.
Baseline can service customers from anywhere, on any device at any time through a single, web-based control centre.
Bruce said: “Redstor is so responsive to partners and that is extremely valuable. The approach is ‘what do you guys need? We’ll go build it’ and I love that.”