Infrascale is a SaaS company, building software solutions that enable companies to leverage the cloud to drive revenue, or reduce costs. We primarily focus on enabling technology companies to launch data intensive SaaS solutions like backup-as-a-service, archiving-as-a-service or fileserver-as-a-service.
Our goal is to virtualize traditional IT hardware objects (file servers, backup arrays, disk based archiving solutions) and convert them into cloud-backed virtual software objects that are available anywhere, securely. That's what we call 'software defined infrastructure'. Our software can run in our cloud, your cloud, or a third party cloud such as Azure or AS3.
Infrascale is the parent entity of SOS Online Backup, Enterprise Protect, and FileLocker.
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SOS Online Backup is Infrascale’s flagship product and is currently being used by over 1000 MSPs in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. SOS offers SMBs simple and feature-rich online backup software. SOS Online Backup features three-tiered encryption, unlimited archiving, iOS and Android applications. |
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Enterprise Protect was born from the idea that a company should be able to backup any device to any storage. Firms who have already attached their infrastructure to AWS, Azure, or Rackspace will find the Enterprise Protect’s flexibility, security, and scalability to be critical to their backup and disaster recovery mission. |
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FileLocker is a secure collaboration solution that can be deployed using the Infrascale cloud or a private cloud designated by the end-user company. FileLocker provides multi-folder synchronization, in-cloud editing, in-cloud preview, and robust administrative controls. |
The Infrascale stack currently powers more than one-thousand cloud service brands. Those thousand brands support hundreds of thousands of companies using our technology, millions of end-points and billions of data objects.
www.infrascale.com, www.sosonlinebackup.com, www.enterpriseprotect.com, www.filelocker.com are all registered trademarks of Infrascale, Inc.
Infrascale is the application at the heart of our Cloud. The Infrascale Platform was first designed on a napkin in a Thai restaurant in 2005. The idea we drew out that night was for a distributed file and document management system made up of millions of heterogeneous end-points or "leaf" nodes (our users), connected to hundreds of distributed compute and storage servers (our "grid"), all controlled by a command-and-control system that sat at the middle of the network (the Infrascale application itself). Imagine a logically central node, surrounded by hundreds of server nodes, surrounded by millions of end-points that leverage those server nodes.
That hub and spoke design underpins our distributed cloud infrastructure which now runs from eleven data-centers on five continents. It’s like a cloud of clouds. Prior to Infrascale, we ran a relatively large network of end-points and servers. After we built the Infrascale application - it all became one semi-intelligent "grid".
Back then, IAP was just a drawing on a napkin. Today, the Infrascale Application Platform is a reality, powering more than one thousand cloud service brands which in turn serve hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of end-points. IAP makes it easy to launch application-as-a-service offerings in the archiving, backup or file-sharing domains. IAP holds all of these services together and is the underlying software fabric that thousands of cloud service brands are leveraging:
Who uses Infrascale is entirely dependent upon the devices that connect to Infrascale, and what companies are using Infrascale.
Millions of end-point devices are connected to Infrascale, protecting, archiving and syncing data. Android and iOS phones use Infrascale to back up business and consumer data. Exchange servers connect to Infrascale to archive mailboxes and complete information stores and even do brick-level message recovery. Database servers use Infrascale to provide continuous remote or on-site backup of critical application data. Facebook can connect to Infrascale to archive Facebook data. Laptops around the world connect to Infrascale to backup, archive, and synchronize and share corporate and business data.
The types of devices connecting to Infrascale:
So which companies use Infrascale? Infrascale operates three retail businesses running on the Infrascale platform.
There are more than one thousand different cloud businesses in all sorts of verticals like document management, mobile/device synchronization, data protection, email archiving, and online backup that use the Infrascale platform. The products offered from these partners leveraging the Infrascale Application Platform include backup-as-a-service, collaboration-as-a-service, file-server-as-a-service, and archiving-as-a-service.
The Infrascale Platform has three defining characteristics:
Security with scalability: Infrascale moves large amounts of data securely, and with infinite horizontal scalability.
Simplicity and abstraction: Infrascale does it simply, and abstracts away both "source data complexity" and "target data complexity".
Cost efficiency: Infrascale is substantially more economical to run than the big public storage clouds like Amazon S3 or Azure.
Moving large amounts of data securely is very difficult. The encryption required to be truly secure means that traditional compression techniques are not available. So how do we do it? We have figured out ways to move large amounts of data very quickly, using clever and unconventional applications of encryption and compression technology coupled with a "swarm" of cooperative load-balanced clouds around the world. We do it securely, and with infinite horizontal scalability: and therein lies our first big advantage.
At least that was where we started. These days, we continue to excel at data protection, archiving and file serving/synchronization via the Cloud, but we've added a layer of abstraction. We try to simplify the complexity of source data and source devices, with a concept we call a "Universal Data API". With the rise of BYOD, and the splintering of the enterprise IT world, unifying heterogeneous data sources and mediating between them to provide logical "verb" operations (like "protect", "archive", "synchronize" or "share") is becoming extremely complex, but also mission-critical. We do it simply: and therein lies our second big advantage.
Putting it a different way, this time in pseudo-code, it should be just as easy to say:
as it is to say:
as it is to say:
We're building a generalized data infrastructure that can move almost any data type to almost any location and back again quickly and securely. In Infrascale engineer meetings we often say, “remember: we are the network, not the disk.” We focus on facilitating the movement of files and documents, rather than just storing them. Sounds nice, but what's that good for? Many things, most notably data protection and backup, archiving, file and data synchronization, sharing, and document collaboration.
Here's how the Infrascale platform sits at the intersection of all sorts of source data today (for both consumer and enterprise use-cases). We are constantly building out the types of "source" data we can work with, but today it ranges from cloud data, through desktop data and mobile data, to more traditional server data (both unstructured fileserver data, as well as more structured application data like SQL Server databases and Exchange and SharePoint).
The other half of the "complexity" problem is target complexity. Whenever a task involves moving a large amount of data (such as in enterprise backup, or archiving, or file-serving over the WAN), problems arise in managing your data destination. Whether that is in managing SANs, NASs or other disk-based storage - with all the varying SLAs and performance profiles that have to be considered, or in managing tape libraries, or in managing third party public cloud storage offerings like AWS S3, or Azure Storage. As a CIO, storage administrator, or a backup administrator - you shouldn't need to worry about capacity planning and procurement and SLAs. Imagine a "magic bit bucket" that has infinite capacity, scales to internet-scale performance requirements, doesn't need to be maintained, can meet all your SLA requirements, provides end-to-end security, and is affordable on a pay-as-you-use model.
Infrascale gives you this. All of our end-point software connectors aggregate data back to one of our virtual appliances, which you can then connect to your own infrastructure ("your cloud"), connect to our data-centers ("our cloud"), or the major third party cloud service provides like Amazon Web Services or Azure ("any cloud").
Our final big advantage is our cost - which translates into our price. We're substantially cheaper for the apps that leverage us, regardless of whether they're deployed on our storage cloud or a favorite public cloud like S3 or Azure - but that's for another post. It also highlights that Infrascale is not an "either/or" proposition: you can use our software as middle-ware that connects to other clouds. We like to say to our customers "use our cloud, your cloud, or any cloud". But use Infrascale to tie it all together.
Because we believe that the cloud is fundamentally transforming the world. Not in the immediately obvious way that the PC revolution of the 80s did, or the way the introduction of Internet mass-availability did in the 90s, or even the tablet revolution of today. But systematically, inexorably, the cloud is changing not just our computing paradigm, but the way we live our lives. The Amazon Kindle is built on the cloud. The Apple iTunes Store is built on the cloud. Facebook is built on the cloud. The use of Twitter throughout the Arab Spring would have been impossible without the cloud.
As a technology consuming world we are moving to an always on, always accessible data paradigm - where humans’ lives live in data, and our data lives in the cloud, which must be available securely anywhere and everywhere.
What does it mean to abstract the movement of data, regardless of its form or complexity, and ensure that it's easy and always secure end-to-end? Data is what illuminates all software. It's the electricity flowing through process. We are trying to unleash it while protecting it and preserving its integrity. This is very important today where because data is a target, we don't always let it fly. Fear costs money and damps innovation.
The Infrascale Team is passionate about this. And about allowing developers, engineers, ISVs, MSPs and all sorts of technology companies to launch their own Cloud applications and services. Our technology is already being put to uses we never would have dreamed up. So we're excited to see where our partners will take their products and services next.
We want technology partners who can leverage our software and our cloud platform, and do truly unique and productive things with it. We'd love you to join the extended Infrascale team. Check out our roadmap. Vote on its features. Become a partner. Build on our API. Launch a cloud business. Participate however you like.