Vembu Technologies, a leading provider of innovative backup and storage solutions, has announced the release of a Free Edition of Vembu StoreGrid, the flexible and feature packed data backup software that simply works with your existing hardware! StoreGrid can enable Peer to Peer, Client-Server, and Remote Online Backups. An innovative concept, "Trusted Peer-to-Peer" backups are a unique feature in StoreGrid.
StoreGrid helps users back up data on their desktops and laptops on to free hard disk space on their peers machines. A group of 'trusted peers' simply need to install StoreGrid on their machines; the machines automatically discover each other to create a Storage Grid for backups. StoreGrids Free Edition is particularly relevant to home and Small Office Home Office (SoHo) users running small networks without elaborate backup infrastructure.
"Two aspects of traditional data protection seem to prevent consumers and small businesses from acting on protecting valuable computer data. First they hate to spend money for what amounts to insurance and second they abhor the discipline of consistent and repeated backup actions." stated Robert Gray, Research VP, Storage Systems, IDC Framingham, MA, "StoreGrid's Free Edition overcomes the first barrier, and once the initial set up is done, it functions automatically behind the scenes overcoming the second barrier. Vembu StoreGrids peer-to-peer technology is well positioned for this under-served market."
StoreGrid's Free Edition is currently available for Windows operating systems and is limited to 3 installations in a network. Other StoreGrid Editions however work on the Windows, Linux, Mac & FreeBSD operating systems, and are perfect for disk to disk backups in client-server and remote backup configurations.
Mr. Kurt Higgins, Network Administrator at Redspring Communications, New York adds, "StoreGrid has been a great solution to our desktop backup needs. Our current tape backup system (for our Windows machines) is near its maximum capacity and adding the Mac desktops to the tape backup was out of the question. After checking on the Mac clients' free hard drive space we found we had a terabyte of unused storage! Installing the software is easy, and configuring the backup jobs even easier. Now each Mac is backed up to a peer Mac. The system is fully automatic after initial configuration. The versioning feature of StoreGrid is an added bonusfrequently a graphic designer will need an older version of a file, and being able to restore an older version of a file is quite a benefit. After using the professional edition, I installed the free edition at home to backup data between my home theater PC and two other desktops. The setup is even easier on the PC than on the Mac. Its proving to be an indispensable tool in the fight against data loss"
The Free Edition has all the bells and whistles youd expect from any high end backup software. Features like continuous data protection, incremental backups, versioning, compression and encryption from StoreGrids Professional Edition have all been retained in the Free Edition. The main difference is in deployment the Free Edition can be used on up to 3 computers within a network unlike 'StoreGrid Professional' which can be used for P2P, client-server and online backups across any number of installations.
Why are they giving it away for free? Lakshmanan Narayan, VP-Marketing at Vembu Technologies answers, "Currently, most backup solutions are targeting the small percentage of people that already have backup on their minds. The real market is in the majority who need to experience how easy it is to backup before they make it a regular facet of their lives. We want to help make that happen, and hopefully theyll remember us as the ones that did! I'm sure that will account for something in the future. Hopefully now, backing up will be on peoples 2006 New Year resolutions lists"
With its many features, multi-platform support and configuration flexibility, StoreGrid is also generating a lot of interest in the enterprise segment where backing up distributed data has often been ignored, especially in the context of increasingly mobile users. This is especially true amongst enterprise users who are increasingly realising that good enterprise software solutions neednt necessarily cost more than their SMB / mid-market counterparts.
About Vembu Technologies: Vembu Technologies is a leading provider of innovative backup and storage solutions. Vembu's flagship product StoreGrid is a flexible feature packed data backup software that simply works with your existing hardware! StoreGrid facilitates trusted peer-to-peer backups, network backups, traditional client-server backups, online backups, and more. Vembu plans to develop more innovative products in the storage domain, all with one objective: that of making storage and backup absolutely affordable (or free) and "easy to deploy and manage" for a broad spectrum of users. Vembu Technologies is located in Chennai, India
