While others in the industry are trying to tackle the growing challenges of backup with on-premise arrays that reach into the public cloud, Zetta.net, Inc. is sticking to the tried-and-true formula of providing data protection directly as a service. The Mountain View, CA-based startup is now looking to press further ahead with the latest release of its flagship platform, which expands the managed value proposition with enhanced workload support and new enterprise capabilities.

DataProtect, as the offering is known, provides an economic option for keeping business information off-premise that doesn’t require organizations to invest in building or contracting with dedicated recovery sites. The service also eliminates the need to move files to a specially-designated local appliance in order to perform backups. That sets it apart from cloud-integrated arrays such as Microsoft Corp.’s recently revived StorSimple line for organizations that would rather maximize cost savings than have completely centralized control over their data. Those include the overwhelming majority of small- and medium-sized businesses as well as many larger companies. That pattern is mirrored in Zetta.net’s customer base, which is made up mostly of but SMBs but which also includes a few big names such as Mazda Motor Corp., Yammer Inc., Mazda Motor Corp. and a number of others.

Yet as appealing as it, affordability wouldn’t be enough on its own to differentiate DataProtect from the dozens of other software-as-a-service products that promise to help CIOs cost-effectively protect corporate data against outages. To separate itself from the pack, Zetta.net incorporated 10 patent-pending data and network optimization technologies into the solution, which it claims enables users to transfer data to the cloud up to 18 times faster than was previously possible. That  translates into as much as five terabytes in 24 hours, according to the company’s website.

DataProtect 4.5 extends that performance server images, which allows customers to save configuration data and thereby avoid unnecessarily prolonging downtime after an outage. For Microsoft shops, the new version includes the ability to store backups in the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format used by Windows and Microsoft’s Hyper-V visualization product. That gives admins the freedom to back up a physical server and restore it to a virtual machine or vice versa. In addition, the release offers a peer-to-peer recovery option for bare-metal Windows environments that utilizes native capabilities instead of relying upon a third party operating system as has been done traditionally.

Besides server images, the latest version of the service also brings with it streaming support for Microsoft SQL and Exchange environments, which now no longer necessitate local disk space to back up. Topping it all off is two-factor authentication based on Google Authenticator that requires both a password and a secondary verification code sent to the user’s mobile device for login.

DataProtect 4.5 is available immediately.

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