Intronis Trots out Fall Backup Update

This spring we brought you news of Itronis’ Spring Release ’13. Six months later we have more to report – the Fall ’13 Release.

This naming convention sounds like a cool takeoff on Microsoft (News - Alert), which starting with Windows 95 began naming many of its products after the year they were released (though sometimes the product beat the date but more often it came a year later).

Intronis (News - Alert), though, has been right on time.

The spring update included better handling of virtual infrastructure. One item in the Spring Release ’13 basket was QuickSpin, which restores virtualized hardware.

And for the channel Intronis boosted its partner portal with better access controls and more customization. For the white boxers out there, Intronis built a Branding Wizard that makes it easier for MPS to customize the portal so it looks like they built it.

This week Intronis shipped the fall release designed to hasten and ease the creation of backup services.

And while the spring was all about supporting virtualization, this time around the watchword is clustering. “These improvements make it possible for channel partners to back up, restore and manage virtual machine host clusters under one data storage solution,” the company said.

That doesn’t mean the virtual world was entirely ignored. To the contrary, support for VMware is expanded with faster backup and restores of VMs, and “user-defined unique destination hosts for multiple virtual machines within a single backup set,” the company added.

Intronis hopes this new software helps it stand out in what is an insanely crowded cloud backup market where everyone it seems is vying for MSPs.

“These new features and functionality introduced in our Fall ’13 Release complete our imaging solution for virtual machines and enable our channel partners to capitalize on the increasing market demand for cloud-based data storage by delivering a more robust backup and recovery service to their customers that also provides total local availability,” says Chuck DeLouis, vice president, product management, Intronis.

Despite all the backup competition, Intronis claims impressive growth, arguing that its last three quarters have had record growth and that the average amount of storage used by its partners has increased some 540 percent over the last three years.

One such partner is Parallel Edge. “Intronis is 100 percent committed to growing its business by helping us grow ours,” said Michael Andrea, principal at the Wayne, Pa.-based MSP. “We’ve seen continued growth in our business since working with Intronis and attribute one of our biggest deals in 2013 and a new growth market in 2014 to Intronis’ sales team. We wouldn’t be in the finance vertical if it wasn’t for Intronis bringing the opportunity to our doorstep.”  

The Intronis MSP Angle

Itronis designs its cloud storage wares with MSPs in mind. That’s why the management console includes billing, scheduling, and account setup.

That’s also why Itronis is so liberal with its branding, allowing MSPs to fully brand the service and the portal that supports it as their own. “We recast our cloud backup software with your logo and your brand, so your clients won't know that you're using our platform. You can rebrand your website, software, and notifications at your convenience,” Itronis argued. And “you can use our portal customization tool to create your own completely branded portal for your clients in just four easy steps: Upload your logo, specify a color scheme, provide company information, and customize email notifications. In just minutes, your customer-facing web portal is entirely branded, meaning your clients will only see your own imagery.”