Spurred on by customer demand and growing backup and storage needs, hosted infrastructure provider The Planet announced a new managed backup service for dedicated server data. 

The solution joins three other Planet Alpha solutions in the Advanced Services division—Alpha Server Monitoring, Alpha Server Security and Alpha Server Administration.

>> READ: The Planet’s Planet Alpha and Planet Northstar hosted infrastructure offerings

Historically, The Planet participated in the self-managed dedicated hosting market, providing data centers, network infrastructure and advanced servers on behalf of customers, and focused exclusively on the Microsoft platform and products.

The acquisition of server administration management company Touch Support last May and demand from customers for managed backup and recovery services spurred the development of Linux-based managed backup services, says Todd Mitchell, The Planet’s general manager for advanced services.

“Our bread and butter is with the Planet Alpha offerings,” says Mitchell, “And a lot of our customers were asking for additional services on top of the self-managed services they were already getting. Managed backup was at the top of their lists, and it’s a natural progression for us.”

The Planet has about 25,000 clients and manages 57,000 servers, he says.

The Alpha Managed Backup offering also provides resellers and MSPs with the resources to attract new customers looking for a solid hosting and backup provider, as well as the opportunity to return to existing managed security or data center customers with additional services.

The Planet’s acquisition of Touch Support added advanced administration tools and personnel with a Linux background, which was a natural fit with The Planet’s existing Planet Alpha service portfolio and for the managed backup services, Mitchell says.

“The Touch Support team came to us with solid, extensive expertise with Linux. It made sense for us to continue to leverage that,” says Mitchell. Additional training was given to the team that handles services and security monitoring, so all staff is completely up to speed on the technology and business issues affecting customers in these areas, he says.

Mitchell says the Planet Alpha services aren’t geared toward any specific company size or market segment.  “There’s no one group that makes up most of our customer set; it’s a pretty equal spread among them. The commonality is customers who have a logical gap in their existing IT staff or expertise,” he says.

With the new solution, customers’ daily backups are continuously monitored, with issues or failures automatically corrected.  Customers are also alerted when they near the limits of their existing storage space. Alpha Managed Backup stores customer data on a high-performance, fault-tolerant storage platform, backed by The Planet’s extensive infrastructure and SAS 70 Type II data centers.