Business cloud solutions specialist Carbonite announced a beta program for its line of all-in-one business continuity appliances, which will be tuned for optimal speed for backup and restore operations, and will include virtual machine failover. The private beta of the appliance line begins in August.
Pricing for the appliance line will start at $99.99 per month, which Carbonite said it expects will include 1TB of local storage and 500GB of cloud storage. All licensing is unlimited, so businesses can protect an unlimited number of servers. Additional cloud storage will be available in 100GB increments at less than $1 per gigabyte per year.
Carbonite appliances will create complete server backup images, both locally and in the cloud, and will include other features such as single socket layer (SSL) encryption for all data transmitted to the cloud, entire disk restore, including separate partitions or select files from a previously created backup image, a backup scheduler, and the ability to create a bootable USB Flash drive or disk.
Each appliance is expected to include the company’s Amanda Enterprise Backup, which takes frequent snapshots of live databases without slowing down response time for users and supports Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint, Oracle and MySQL. Other features include real-time reporting across backup sets for performance tuning and regulatory compliance and active notifications through email or a Windows event log and usage reports across multiple systems through the dashboard.
“While we are strong believers in cloud backup, small businesses need solutions that not only protect against data loss, but also minimize downtime. With a local appliance, you get the best of all worlds: local backup for speed, cloud backup for ultimate safety, and virtual machine failover to keep businesses running even when primary equipment fails,” David Friend, CEO and chairman of Carbonite, said in a statement. “By helping to keep small businesses up and running even in the face of equipment failures, we are delivering far more value to our customers than we would through cloud-based data protection alone.”
In addition, each Carbonite appliance will come with Valet Installation, which means users simply plug in the power, connect to the Internet, and call Carbonite’s Valet Installation team, which will remotely configure the appliance and assist with setting up a client’s first backup set.
In the case of a disaster like fire, flood or theft, server images can be downloaded from the cloud for a complete restore. Meanwhile, the appliance will be able to spin up a virtual machine so businesses can continue to operate while equipment is being repaired or replaced. With the Carbonite appliances, businesses will be able to restore a backup to a virtual machine in the event of a server crash.