GRAND RAPIDS — The Grand Rapids network services and cloud hosting provider US Signal has introduced a new system of backup and recovery services.
The company says the new services give data-intensive businesses the ability to meet or exceed disaster recovery plan objectives.
Said Stephen Oyer, executive vice president of sales and marketing: “US Signal owns and operates eight Midwest data centers and we have built our data protection suite around the geographic diversity and network connectivity of our current infrastructure, giving customers the option to choose which data center they would like their backup location to be.”
The company’s Backup-as-a-Service allows the customer to back up files or full physical or virtual machine disk images to US Signal owned and operated storage architecture. Data is automatically compressed between 50 to 70 percent on average, reducing the time and space needed to complete backups. US Signal customers have the ability to set one to 30 days or indefinite retention schedules with Recovery Point Objectives as low as one minute.
“What is also unique about this service is that it can be managed remotely as long as you have access to the Internet,” said Oyer. “All the customer needs is the ability to get online and they are able to restore their data from anywhere.”
For those who use the backup service, US Signal also offers Recovery-as-a-Service, which allows customers to recover their backups to a US Signal Resource Pool or Hosted Private Cloud (HPC) environment. Customers have the option to choose from a reserved or on-demand recovery service. Reserved customers elect to have a Resource Pool or HPC environment on standby, which decreases their Recovery Time Objective by having pre-built compute environments ready for a customer declared recovery event.
With the purchase of backup and recovery services, US Signal provides a complete playbook detailing disaster recovery plans and processes. These plans are developed and maintained by US Signal and reviewed with the customer regularly, so that the US Signal professional services team is ready to recover and restore customer environments in the event of a disaster.
“Our recovery service gives our customers the option to begin working before the recovery is complete by making files needed immediately available to the customer while the rest of the recovery is in process,” Oyer said. “And all recovery is managed by trained professionals, which frees up our customers’ time to manage their day-to-day business operations.”
US Signal offers more than 14,000 miles of lit fiber and metro rings in 23 markets in the Midwest. The network’s optical backbone features Cisco Systems’ latest carrier class architecture and supports all of US Signal’s products. US Signal’s product portfolio includes colocation, security and computing services to complement its network offerings.
To learn more about US Signal, visit www.ussignal.com.