Netmagic, Zerto Partner to Expand its Disaster Recovery as a Service

Netmagic, an NTT Company, and India's leading managed hosting and multi-cloud Hybrid IT solution provider, today announced its partnership with Zerto to enrich its Disaster Recovery as a Services (DRaaS) portfolio. The partnership will enable enterprises with faster and cost-effective disaster recovery of critical IT infrastructure. Zerto, a leader in IT resilience, replaces legacy solutions with a single platform to enable disaster recovery (DR), data protection, and workload mobility across hyperscale clouds, hosted services, and on-premise data centers.

Netmagic DRaaS is a complete DR Management platform with a pay-per-use model. With workflow automation capabilities, it simplifies DR processes and dashboards to provide real-time visibility that is tied into the organization's objectives in terms of availability, Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). With this new partnership with Zerto, customers will get a lower-cost alternative to traditional DR solutions. With Netmagic managing the entire DR process, customers can stay focused on their core critical business.

Speaking about this, Nitin Mishra, Chief Product Officer, Netmagic (An NTT Company) said, “The partnership with Zerto will enable us to boost up our existing capabilities in DRaaS. With the Zerto IT Resilience Platform, we will be able to provide Cold DR Solution which will enable on Demand DR and a reduction in TCO for customers. This will be an end-to-end DR service allowing for the design, plan, and implementation of DR, with the key highlights being automated failover and failback operations beside dashboards for governance. By leveraging Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform, we will provide managed services for all aspects of DR planning, testing, and management.”

With organizations shifting to a new normal and work from home approach, data security and digital transformation initiatives are more significant than ever. Netmagic is a pioneer in offering the best tech-based solutions and with Zerto, these offerings will be further enhanced. Netmagic DRaaS service is based on per protected workload (Virtual machine) on a pay as use model. Customers will not only benefit by an upscale data continuity but also a much-optimized pay per use infrastructure.

“We are excited to have Netmagic join Zerto’s ecosystem of partners. We see Netmagic as a critical component to our strategy of providing DRaaS to the marketplace in India. Netmagic’s offering will allow customers to consume DRaaS, with the ability to scale on demand.  This offering will meet the needs of customers who need world class DR while taking advantage of the cost benefits of the pay-per-use model,” said Greg Bailey, Director of Channel & Cloud Sales EMEA, Zerto.

What is the latest buzz on Sun, IBM deal?

Whether it is mere speculation or a fact , the combination of two IT giants -- IBM and Sun Microsystems -- will surely alter the dynamics of the IT services market.

Of recent times, everybody is racing to offer hardware-software services and own data centres. We have seen that happen with Cisco s Unified Computing Systems, HP bought EDS, now IBM is looking at Sun.

There is no official comment from the two companies, but if the deal goes through it will give IBM a bigger control of the market and make it a fitting rival for HP, Dell and Microsoft.

Together, IBM and Sun would have about 65% of the market for server computers running the Unix operating system and 42% of the total server market, measured by the dollar value of the market.

Like Sun's Java and Solaris, the operating systems have gained substantial market share over the years. Similarly, Sun could give it some extra hardware market share specifically in servers.

However, reports indicate that Sun has not been doing well ever since the global recession began last September. Reports indicate that IBM may pay at least $6.5 billion in cash for the deal, which would be a 100% premium over Tuesday's closing price for Sun.

In last year's fourth quarter, IBM led in the global server market revenue with $4.9 billion in sales, about 36% of the market. HP was No. 2 with $3.9 billion in sales ie, about 29% of the market. Dell, with $1.4 billion in sales, and Sun, with about $1.3 billion, were a distant No. 3 and No. 4.

However, Sun's Solaris servers have a strong presence in the premium market, which is seen as more profitable. That is why that valuation may be justifiable for IBM.

But Sun's recent acquisition of StorageTek for $4.1 billion was termed as a hogwash, mainly because it did not go well with Sun and ended up in cold waters.

With customers like HDFC Bank, Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Tata Teleservices, Sun's strong presence in the financial services and telecom domains has been the envy of its rivals.

But in case of a merger, issues like having a number of common customers and how to merge the two global brands will come up. As a Sun employee, said, Sun employees are concerned about the future of our products if the acquisition happens, since there is a significant overlap between our products and that of IBM s.

Sun's corporate communications office terms it as a mere speculation and refused to comment on the rumour . So did the IBM communication team, saying they have no reactions from their headquarters and cannot comment on the issue.

Meanwhile, T.R. Madan Mohan, managing partner, Browne and Mohan, said that the WSJ picked up the news from the blog of a Sun employee.

According to him, the deal may not come through, but given the market cap of Sun, which is just about $ 2 billion, and IBM is supposed to have quoted $ 6.5 to $ 6.8 billion that is a very good valuation for a company that has been dithering.

Similarly, Sun's strengths are in government, BFSI and telecom. In telecom, it has some marque clients such as NTTDocomo, Dialog, Telefunken, Vodafone, etc which run mission-critical applications.

IBM has not been able to move into these accounts globally, unlike the easy entry the company had with Bharti Airtel, Aircel, Vodafone, Idea in India. By acquiring Sun, IBM will get access to these critical markets and benefit from the Java/My SQL communities.

CXOtoday