Persystent Up Time For MSPs

Company: Persystent Technologies

Headquarters: Tampa, Fla.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Persystent Suite

Year Founded: 2002

Number of Channel Partners: 10 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Managed Service Providers

Why You Should Care: The Persystent Suite gives MSPs the ability to provide best-in-class service level agreements to end users that will reduce their downtime because of software issues and allows MSPs to scale their organizations to more customers.

The Lowdown: Persystent Technologies offers managed service providers a disaster recovery and backup solution for desktops and notebooks that creates a reoccurring revenue stream while simultaneously freeing up the company to pursue more clients.

The Persystent Suite is a Windows-centric real-time

Persystent Edge

recovery product that is geared toward reducing the time MSPs have to spend at clients' shops. The solution works by capturing a master or "gold" image of a customer's system that is referred to when the machine starts up every day. The company in November also launched Persystent Edge, which incorporates Persystent Suite into a plug-and-play hardware appliance.

"The Suite installs a hidden partition that is unseen by the user," said Marty Davis, director of industry and national account sales for Tampa, Fla.-based Persystent Technologies. "When a machine is booted, a real-time comparison between the active image and gold image starts."

If there is a discrepancy between the active image and gold image, the Persystent Suite restores the gold image, and it does it in less than 30 seconds.

"If a file has been added maliciously or accidentally, if a rogue agent is picked up on the Web, the solution recognizes the file as something that shouldn't be there," Davis said. "Any software problem can be solved by rebooting."

The Persystent Suite can be managed remotely, allowing MSPs to see the images that are stored on a server through a Web console. If a disaster happens or if a machine becomes corrupt, a customer can reboot the machine, which will look to the stored gold image for changes and then correct any problems by the time the OS starts up.

"Managed service providers are looking to our solution as a way to manage overhead," Davis said. "Rather than spending time with customers, MSPs can focus on adding new clients without expanding their staff."