Carbonite Launches Beta Program for BC Appliances

Carbonite,
Inc. announced a beta program for its line of all-in-one
BC appliances.

The appliances will be tuned for speed
for backup and restore operations, and will include VM failover. The
company’s appliance line offers the speed benefits of local backups
along with the safety of cloud storage. If a server dies, restoring
from a local appliance is easy. In the case of a disaster like fire,
flood or theft, server images can be downloaded from the cloud for a
restore. Meanwhile, the appliance will be able to spin up a VM so
businesses can continue to operate while equipment is being repaired
or replaced.

"I know that many of our small
business resellers and customers will be pleased to see Carbonite
moving into hardware appliances," said David Friend, CEO and
chairman, Carbonite. "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 VM failover to keep businesses running even when
primary equipment fails. 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."

Pricing and Set-up

Pricing will start at $99.99/month,
which the company 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 $1GB/year.

Every appliance will come with Valet
Installation: Plug in the power, connect to the internet, and call
the Valet Installation team who will remotely configure the appliance
and assist with setting up a client’s first backup set.

Backup Appliance Features and
Benefits

Bare Metal Backup and Restore
The appliances will create complete
server backup images, both locally and in the cloud.

Other features will include:

• Differential backup

• Backup scheduler

• SSL encryption for all data transmitted
  to the cloud

• Data, application and system
  state restore

• Disk restore, including separate
  partitions or select files from a previously created backup image

• Create a bootable USB flash drive or
  disk

Hot Backup of Live Production
Databases
Powered by Amanda
Every appliance is expected to include
the company’s Amanda enterprise backup. This database backup system
is based on the open-source Amanda platform with an estimated
installed base of more than one million computers.

• Hot backup technology takes frequent
  snapshots of live databases without slowing down response time for
  users. Supports SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint, Oracle and
  MySQL.

• The ability to capture the complete
  Windows system state, including Active Directory, system volume,
  certificate server, boot files, Internet Information Services (IIS)
  and registry.

• Real-time reporting across backup sets
  for performance tuning and regulatory compliance.

• Active notifications via email or a
  Windows event log and usage reports across multiple systems via the
  dashboard.

VM Failover
When a server dies, a small business
needs to get it backup and running even though it can take days to
get a server repaired or replaced. With these appliance, businesses
will be able to restore a backup to a VM, allowing them to stay up
and running with minimum downtime.

A private beta of Carbonite’s appliance
line begins in August.