One feature that is very good is the backup and validation process that's built into Era. It saves a lot of time and gives you some kind of assurance that when you actually pull a backup, it is done correctly and you will be able to restore it. In other backup systems, because they are not database-aware, that validation process is not as easy because you have to actually restore the backup to see that it worked. With Era, it actually validates on the fly so you know you'll be able to restore. The deployment process is a lot easier, due to the fact that with Era you can actually script a deployment. If you have a lot of deployments of the same type, say for instance you have a user request coming in to say they need a basic database schema, you can just run that as a deploy script and it automatically sets up everything. It takes about five minutes and the users have access to their database. In the past, we had to go through a whole setup and deployment process, which for us, took about half a day. That's a lot of time that we save. Setting up a development test and production environment is quite easy and it saves a lot of storage because the dev and test databases are non-data clones of production, where only the changes are saved. For example, if you have a two-terabyte production database then it saves a lot of space because you don't have to have a two-terabyte test database as well.
