BakBone offers cheaper storage option -
SmartDisk allows use of commodity products
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 15:33, 16 October 2009
Storage software specialist BakBone has released a new version of its flagship NetVault product as well as offering users additional disk-based backup and deduplication options with SmartDisk, the first product that uses BakBone's new Open Data Protection Platform (ODPP).
The company claimed that SmartDisk could lead to disk savings of up to 90 percent. The key element is that it reduces hardware costs by using existing storage infrastructure without the need to us specialised drives or equipment.
According to Andrew Brewerton, BakBone's technical director for EMEA, said that SmartDisk would increase the range of options for its customers. "ODPP is a strategic piece of technology. It enables users to save to a commodity platform, meaning that they don't have to save to expensive storage options, customers will now be able to buy the cheapest disk." He added that a key element of the launch was de-duplication. He said that the company was solving some of the problems associated with encryption by allowing customers to deduplicate the primary copy and only encrypt the secondary copy. "This way we keep encrypted code out of the back up stream," he said.
Brewerton said the company had focused on three other areas for NetVault 8.5. "Firstly, we've worked on platform support. We've added support for Windows 7 and some Linux distributions. There wasn't much work to do them as our code is heterogeneous and designed to be ported across platforms"
Brewerton said that the company had also overhauled the encryption, moving from 128-bit to 256-bit encryption and had stepped up its support for virtualisation. "We were quick off the mark with VMware plug-in," he said, " and we've now done the same for Hyper-V"
BakBone's move has met with analyst approval. "Deduplication remains a wide open market with the large value of deduplication still in front of us," said Arun Taneja, consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "BakBone's advantage is the one-stop approach for deduplication and backup without being tied to a particular disk solution."
