Datalink Expands Services With Managed Backup

Datalink Corp., provider of data center infrastructure and services, announced a managed backup service designed to free customers' in-house IT staff for business-critical projects by relieving them of day-to-day responsibility for backup operations.

The service leverages Datalink's 160+ technical experts, dedicated managed services staff and more than 25 years of experience with backup technologies to deliver backup protection for enterprise and mid-tier organizations with Symantec NetBackup environments, including 24x7 coverage rarely available from an organization's own IT team.

The managed backup program is the second managed service introduced by Datalink within a month. The company previously announced a managed monitoring service that tracks data center infrastructure systems and applications to maximize performance and IT service delivery. Together, the two services enable customers to optimize use of their internal IT resources by outsourcing IT administration functions.

In addition to 24x7 remote monitoring to detect issues in the backup infrastructure to mitigate the risk of data loss, Datalink's managed backup service features:

• Support for multiple data protection technologies, including a 17-year partnership with Symantec and status as Symantec's largest Technical Support Partner that enables Datalink's OneCallSM technical support engineers to close 95% of all reported incidents without Symantec assistance.
• Remediation and restore capabilities, which includes initiating restores within 30 minutes of the request.
• Visibility into backup operational performance through a customer portal that provides real-time performance reports. All reports can be scheduled for daily, weekly, or quarterly delivery.
• Real-time notification of backup failures, if and when they occur.
• A team of backup managers who work with Datalink engineers and OneCall technical support staff, leveraging their cross-functional expertise and over 1,000 technical certifications to ensure problem resolution.

Datalink can also support any backup strategy including:

• tape, disk and cloud;
• customize solutions for any backup scenario including long-term management of tape archives; and
• provide new backup system design and deployment utilizing a choice of technologies including Symantec, Data Domain, Quantum, Oracle, Spectra Logic and others.

"Most companies lack good visibility into their backup environments as well as the up-to-date expertise on backup technologies required for problem diagnosis and resolution. Those deficiencies increase the risk of a backup failure and data loss," said Mike Parsons VP of support services at Datalink. "Our new managed backup service closes those gaps, stretches customers' IT resources, and ensures that any irregularity in the backup environment is detected and addressed quickly, expertly and with minimum disruption in data availability."

"Datalink is in a unique position to provide managed backup and monitoring services because our team of more than 160 engineers, senior administrators and backup operators is experienced in every aspect of the data center infrastructure. If Microsoft Exchange backups are failing, for example, you need deep knowledge of Exchange to solve the problem. Most managed service providers do not have that expertise," added Datalink president and CEO Paul Lidsky. "This is a major benefit for our customers, who can now use Datalink to build as well as manage key data center components that are critical to running their business."