Kuala Lumpur, 26 January: HeiTech Managed Services, a wholly owned managed services subsidiary of HeiTech Padu, today launched Padu M.O.B.S (Managed Online Backup Services), the first such hosted backup service in Malaysia, designed especially for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).

The company will initially target the services at its current 40 customers which store their tape backup off-site with it. Most of them are small-to-medium sized manufacturers (SMIs), SMBs and insurance companies.

Based on Avamar technology from EMC Computer Systems (Malaysia), Padu M.O.B.S. remotely stores data backed up from an organisation's servers, desktop & notebook PCs, as well as mobile smart phones onto servers at HeiTech Padu's Tier IV secure data centre in Bukit Jelutong, Shah Alam.

End-to-end security of data backed up is provided by 256-bits Advanced Encryption Standard cryptography.

Further protection against storage hardware failure on Padu M.O.B.S. servers redundancy of hard disks is provided by different RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) techniques. For further hardware or power supply failure, it employs EMC's patented Redundant Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) which auto-duplicates data across two separate and independent storage servers. Security against corruption of data is provided by EMC's CheckPoint software, which provides for roll back to the “last good condition” each day.

The next level of data protection against a catastrophe, such as fire at the data centre, is to maintain an exact copy of all the data at one data centre on another at a different location, which HeiTech Managed Services will do based upon customer demand. 

End users don't require expensive leased lines, since service works over regular ADSL broadband connections, such as TM's Streamyx.

While the initial backup of terabytes of data may take while but subsequent backups are incremental and only backup data which has been added or changed since the last backup.

To further conserve bandwidth requirements, the system employs de-duplication at the source, which backs up only one copy of identical documents, files and other data in different directories on the end user's platform.

Padu M.O.B.S. provides two packages. The basic package does simple backups and preserves the data for seven days, while the standard package is more scalable and allows customers to do incremental backups and choose the duration of its storage.

HeiTech Managed Services charges customers RM3,000 a one-time setup charge and subsequently charges a minimum of RM1,300 for up to the first 100GB of data stored within a month plus RM13 for each additional gigabyte stored within that month.

As business partner, EMC Malaysia will help promote awareness of and market the service.