Bekker's Blog

Blog archive

Buffalo Americas, StorageCraft Team on SMB DR Appliance

Managed service providers serving small-business customers got a new backup and disaster recovery appliance option this month through a partnership between Buffalo Americas and StorageCraft Technology Corp.

The TeraStation StorageCraft Recovery Center 25 is a new joint offering aimed at end-user companies with about 25 employees.

StorageCraft and Buffalo have partnered at a technology level previously to make sure that StorageCraft's business continuity software worked with Buffalo's network attached storage devices. A jointly marketed appliance is a first for the two companies, though. The companies say their collaboration transforms a general-purpose NAS into a disaster recovery device.

The 11-1/4-inch by 7-1/4-inch by 8-1/4-inch appliance weighs just under 17 pounds and sports 12TB of storage on four SATA 3.0 internal hard drives. The processor is an Intel Core i3 3.3GHz Dual-Core and the machine runs on 8GB of DDR3 RAM.

While it's a small device for small businesses, StorageCraft CTO Scott Barnes says the appliance will have a lot of flexibility for various use cases.

"If a small business wants local recovery only, great. If they want to replicate between two offices, no problem. If they want full cloud-base recovery, easily done," Barnes said in a statement. Out-of-the-box replication and recovery options include local-only, site-to-site and site-to-IT solution providers' colocation/datacenter with replication from any of those options to public cloud or to StorageCraft Cloud Services.

Bill Rhodes, director of channel sales at Buffalo Americas, positioned the appliance as an opportunity for Buffalo TeraStation resellers to generate service revenues and for StorageCraft software resellers to go to market with a more competitively priced configuration than they could build themselves.

Because of the small-business focus of the appliance, Buffalo is working exclusively through D&H Distributing. Estimated retail price for the appliance is $3,500.

Software in the package includes StorageCraft ShadowProtect SPX, StorageCraft ImageManager, StorageCraft Recovery Environment, Oracle VirtualBox and Windows Storage Server 2012 R2. Some software licenses must be purchased separately.

Posted by Scott Bekker on February 25, 2016


Featured