Cobalt Iron on Tuesday came out of stealth mode with the introduction of technology that it claims unifies a business' data protection requirements into a single on-premises or cloud storage solution.

Cobalt Iron provides a consistent interface that offers businesses the right class of protection that combines file services, file-level backups, continuous data protection, database and email server protection, and virtualized environments across any operating environment via an appliance, said Richard Spurlock, CEO and founder of the Lawrence, Kan.-based company.

"We're passionate about complex servers and storage getting backed up properly," Spurlock said.

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Cobalt Iron's Adaptive Data Protection technology combines enterprise backup and cloud data protection technologies into a single offering to unify the data protection process, Spurlock said.

That data protection capability is built around the company's Cobalt Iron Vault, an appliance that automates the backing up of data from all of the company's devices.

The Cobalt Iron Vault is available as a high-speed stand-alone appliance that backs up data to a local storage array as well as to Cobalt Iron's own storage cloud or to a cloud run by an MSP, Spurlock said. It can also be deployed as a virtual appliance in conjunctions with a customer's own private storage cloud, he said.

Customers can also tie two Cobalt Iron Vaults at separate sites to replicate data to each other as part of a disaster recovery plan. "It handles daily automatic backups," he said. "If one goes down, the other can take over."

When used for disaster recovery, the Cobalt Iron Vaults allow testing of the disaster recovery system on an on-demand basis, he said.

The result is a solution that adds data protection flexibility to companies ranging in size from a small business with five servers to a large enterprise, Spurlock said.

The Cobalt Iron cloud backup service is available for a monthly fee starting at $750 per TB of capacity, a price that includes all the related applications and includes protection for an unlimited number of servers and desktops. There is also a per-month service charge of $390 to $3,600 for the Cobalt Iron Vault.

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Cobalt Iron's Spurlock said that a midmarket customer with 15 servers and 50 desktop PCs with an on-premises appliance and an offsite cloud might pay $3,050 per month for a complete data protection service. In another example, an enterprise with 105,000 desktops and a private cloud might pay about $2.35 per user per month, he said.

Cobalt Iron is currently recruiting solution providers that are trying to look beyond traditional hardware sales to build a services business, as well as MSPs who can use the company's solution as a services offering for customers of any size, Spurlock said.

Cobalt was founded by Spurlock and by Chief Architect Robert Marett, both of whom hail from Starfire Technologies, a nearly 20-year-old solution provider and IBM business partner focused on the virtualization, disaster recovery and business continuity markets.

PUBLISHED NOV. 13, 2012