Obsidian enters Zmanda reseller agreement

South Africa’s largest Linux solutions company, Obsidian Systems, has announced that it has signed a reseller partner agreement with Zmanda, a leading provider of open source backup and recovery software.

Solutions include Amanda Enterprise, Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL and Zmanda Internet Backup (ZIB), designed to make it simple and affordable to backup and recover data in an increasingly complex and heterogeneous IT environment.

Muggie van Staden, MD at Obsidian, says Obsidian is expanding its enterprise open source stack and identified backup and recovery solutions as a key part of its overall growth strategy.

“Plenty companies are realising the benefits of open source solutions amidst tough economic pressures in the market today. Every company that wants to remain in business requires backups and Zmanda offers a viable alternative to expensive proprietary backup solutions currently available. We are pleased to have such a high-profile open source partner on board,” says van Staden.

He says Obsidian is particularly interested in is ZRM for MySQL, the first mission-critical backup and recovery solution designed specifically for MySQL databases. “Obsidian is a MySQL partner so it’s a natural mix for us and our customers,” he says.

ZRM for MySQL simplifies the life of a database administrator who needs a flexible and robust backup and recovery solution and is the only backup solution that is endorsed by MySQL. With ZRM for MySQL, administrators can perform flexible backups, schedule full, incremental, raw and logical backups, use snapshot technologies, activate CDP and achieve point in time recovery, to name a few.

Rich Nave, Director of Sales for Africa and Asia at Zmanda, says Zmanda considers South Africa to be a fast growing IT market and decided that Obsidian would be the appropriate partner because of its solid track-record of delivering successful implementations and support in the local open source software market.

“Zmanda offers data protection solutions optimised for today's infrastructure and priced for today's economy. Our strong adherence to open standards and open formats gives greater flexibility to system administrators.”

“In fact, we believe that more and more system administrators in South Africa will move away from ad hoc approach to backup to a centrally managed and supported backup solution. Obsidian will be our eyes, ears and feet in this market,” concludes Nave.