We recently chatted with Eric Hall, VP/CTO at AMAAX in Dublin, Ohio. A Storage Guardian VAR partner, AMAAX continues to increase the data stored with us, so we thought Eric’s observations would be of interest to other VARs and MSPs.

How would you describe Amaxx?
Amaxx was started in 1996 as a dial-up ISP reseller. We’ve since evolved into a facility-based telecom company that focuses on small to mid-size businesses, offering them an outsourced IT department. The company has attracted a loyal following with professional services businesses such as doctors, lawyers — we’ve optimized our services for these businesses.

What range of services do you offer?
We provision local and wide area networks, private networks and public internet access, provide onsite computer services, and offer a range of managed services. We’re partnered with some of the top names in IT so we are able to deliver the highest level of support — before, during and after the sale.

Before you work with them, how are most of your clients handling backups?
Most new clients have been using manual backup approaches — tape or disk. Our experience is that these approaches are generally inefficient and unreliable. Human error is certainly one problem – often the person who is actually handling the manual aspects of tape backups is not very experienced. And the backup media is rarely stored offsite or in a secure area. The other aspect is that SMBs are often overwhelmed by the volume of data that needs to be backed up. One example: a company was doing a full tape backup every night—it took hours—yet they didn’t have a trained IT person. It looked like a disaster waiting to happen.

How do you present online backup services to them?
The first thing we do after engaging with a client is an audit so we can understand their current data protection and backup processes. Nowadays, we always propose that they switch to online backup, and clients are pleased to learn that this is a cost-effective approach. We point out that it involves no capital expenditure, will eliminate the manual labor involved with tape or disk methods, and will require no more offsite storage of tapes.

What we’re offering our clients is a very compelling service that enhances our set of managed services. If a client experiences anything from accidental file deletion to catastrophic server loss, we can have them up and running in 48 hours.

What’s it like to work with Storage Guardian?
We view Storage Guardian as a key partner because they enable us to offer disaster recovery to our clients. Their service is rock-solid and generates a good supplemental income for us. Right now, we’re evaluating how we can boost our bottom line by migrating some of our clients’ data to a tiered-storage model, and we’re looking forward to the features offered by the Asigra 9.0 release.