--Self-healing for increased uptime: A number of services offer a best-effort attempt to help clients recover from disasters, but there have been some notable failures in those offerings. Code 42 recognizes a simple fact of IT life--everything fails eventually. So its own approach is to engineer enough redundancy to significantly reduce the chance of failure (a "beyond RAID" approach). Yes, if a central site fails, the data may still exist at the individual device level, but it is not good business to rely upon that fact.
--Real-time policy enforcement: IT needs to ensure that policy changes are enforced quickly on all desktops and laptops for which it has backup responsibility. If IT makes a change (say, for even 10,000 computers), policies should take effect in what might be called near real-time (which means seconds for online devices and within seconds of those coming "on" from being offline). Code 42 is neither batch nor pull, as it provides an always on/always connected architecture.
--Deleted file retention: Code 42 defaults to "forever" in retaining deleted files whereas other solutions offer as little as 30 days. This is important in case something needs to be retrieved much later than 30 days. However, CrashPlan Pro also allows users to set policy-based points to permanently delete files.
--All version retention: This means that CrashPlan saves all changes to a file over time since the service backs up data nearly continuously (every 30 to 60 seconds is close enough to continuous for files in the vast majority of cases). This can be done efficiently through data deduplication (a popular buzzword today) at the block level. While not necessary for every case or customer, this feature is important for users who inadvertently deleted earlier versions of critical documents.
At a time when some vendors and their clients are nickel and diming IT to a fare-thee-well, it was refreshing to hear Code 42 state that it provides the most expensive solution for enterprise backup for desktops and laptops. That does not mean that Code 42 can charge any price it wants, but it does reflect the fact that every IT solution and deal does not necessarily have to compete on price alone. Rather, customers must consider competitive differentiators in feature and function to determine if the more expensive solutions offset cheaper products' delta difference in price.
