Simply Continuous launches disaster recovery service

A disaster recovery start-up called Simply Continuous is launching a managed service for enterprises that need to back up and recover applications and multiple terabytes of data.

Simply Continuous installs an appliance at the customer’s site, which integrates with existing backup infrastructure, and replicates data to a co-location facility. Customers use a Web portal to monitor their off-site data and restore digital assets when necessary. Two services are available: Data Recovery Vault, which recovers data; and AppAlive, which recovers whole applications.

Simply Continuous has been selling to customers since last year but is announcing a more formal launch Tuesday.

Analyst Deni Connor of Storage Strategies NOW says “their ability to offer an SLA (service-level agreement) for recovery is a very cool thing. It’s not something you see with other online offerings.” Also interesting is “the ability for the user to go into a portal to monitor the backup process,” Connor says.

While most recovery can be achieved over the Internet, Simply Continuous will replicate data to a new appliance and ship it to a customer in the event of a major disaster.

The company’s initial offerings are designed for customers using Data Domain backup products, which specialize in de-duplication to reduce backup needs, but Simply Continuous says it built its architecture so it can integrate with other vendors’ systems. Data Domain is the subject of a bidding war between EMC and NetApp, a situation Simply Continuous executives are watching closely.

The bidding war is “certainly something we’re keeping our eyes on,” says co-founder and CEO Tom Frangione. “We built the service around Data Domain. There are obvious logical extensions of that to companies like NetApp and EMC.”

Simply Continuous is based in San Francisco and has raised about $10 million in venture funding from investors led by Greylock Partners. Frangione previously co-founded wireless company Telephia, which was sold to Nielsen for $400 million in 2007. CTO and fellow co-founder Chris Eidler previously helped launch Mendocino Software, a continuous data protection vendor which reportedly closed its doors last year; and he also co-founded the storage service provider StorageWay and held positions at several other storage companies.

Simply Continuous is trying to appeal to mid-sized enterprises that need more robust capabilities than you get from consumer products like EMC’s Mozy, but can’t afford high-end services like Iron Mountain or SunGard. Simply Continuous says its customers are also likely to be migrating away from tape backup.

For Data Recovery Vault, typical customer engagements cost between $2,500 and $3,000 a month, and customers can start for as little as $500 a month if they’re just backing up a few hundred gigabytes. Customers can scale up to hundreds of terabytes of data, however. Simply Continuous stores all data with i/o Data Centers’ co-location facility in Arizona.