FastNeuron and Oter Informatica Enter Partnership

FastNeuron Inc., a developer of Hyper-V server backup software, announced its alliance with Oter Informatica S.L., a Hyper-V data center and consulting company based in Barcelona, Spain. The two companies join forces to provide BackupChain Backup Software to users in Spain and offer local backup-related services to Spanish-speaking users.

Oter Informatica, S.L. is a provider of Hyper-V server virtualization services in Barcelona, Spain, and specializes in providing high-availability virtual hosting services to the Spanish market. Furthermore, Oter Informatica is an online retailer and remote backup provider in Spain and has been offering backup solutions and services to the Spanish audience for many years.

The Eurozone compared with the US market is currently witnessing a boom in both customer purchases of foreign products and government spending. The euro in comparison with the US dollar is now relatively stable at purchasing 1.40 US dollars for every Euro. This stability and strength of the Euro has further encouraged Europeans to seek out US products at a currency discount. The currency situation is hence also lucrative for U.S. businesses that expand abroad as their products are priced well below European alternatives.

The goal of the Spanish partnership is to aid Spanish SMBs in reducing their virtualization costs. The recent boom seen in Spanish Hyper-V Server installations is evidence for the fast-paced adoption of Microsoft’s virtual machine technology; however, the increase in virtual host investments also necessitates an increase in data security spending. FastNeuron’s partner, being an experienced virtual hosting provider to Spanish corporations, reduces its customer’s virtual backup costs by deploying BackupChain Backup Software in its data centers and offering the product at its retail locations.

In addition to Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and VMware, BackupChain Backup Software targets Microsoft’s free virtualization platform Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, which has sparked a worldwide adoption of virtual machines at low cost. Since virtualization relies on hosting several servers virtually at the same time, the risk of data loss has effectively multiplied. One solution to counteract the risk of data loss is to invest in server clusters. To many SMBs, however, the costs of high-availability clusters remain prohibitive and may even neutralize the economic gain that results from virtualization in some settings. The solution to the problem is usually to invest in a more efficient backup system.

"What our users value the most is our flat licensing model, our reliable live virtual machine backup features, and our proprietary delta compression technology", explains FastNeuron’s CTO Savas Papadopoulos. "For larger data centers the cost of backups and backup software can quickly become prohibitive. For that reason, BackupChain is also offered through volume licensing and organization-wide licenses. "The costs of backup storage should also not be underestimated. BackupChain’s delta compression generates virtual machine histories that span months rather than days on the same backup media using efficient file version differencing. The smaller backups result in less storage and smaller bandwidth requirements if the virtual machines are backed up remotely using FTP."

Having access to a local and Spanish-speaking support base is an advantage to BackupChain users who live in Spain. Furthermore, the strategic partnership combines the backup software offering with the numerous local services provided by the Spanish partner, which include consulting and hosting support.