New 3X Appliance Offers Remote Backup Via the Cloud

Company:

Headquarters: Columbus, OH

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: 3X Remote Backup Appliance

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 160 in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Small business backups are tough, but 3X Systems enables solution providers to build a mini storage cloud with a new backup appliance that keeps up with their mobile and desktop PCs, wherever they are moved.

The Lowdown: 3X Systems wants to help solution providers take the pain out of small business data backup and recovery and get their piece of the small business storage cloud.

The company this week started shipping its Remote Backup Appliance (RBA), a device which serves as a backup target for desktop and mobile PCs even if the PCs are moved to different locations.

Solution providers can bring the 3X RBA storage appliance to a customer site to do the initial "seed" backup, said Alan Arman, CEO and co-founder of 3X. All the office and mobile PC clients automatically backup their data to the RBA as it changes, with deduplication technology cutting the time required, Arman said.

The appliance's locater service lets PCs automatically find it over the Internet to do their backups, building in essence a mini private storage cloud, Arman said. Should a server crash or a disaster occur, the 3X RBA can be brought to the customer site or to a remote recovery site in order to restore operations, he said.

The 3X RBA is HIPAA-compliant, and encrypts data in-transit and on the appliance, Arman said. It works with all Microsoft operating systems, and Macintosh and Linux support are on the roadmap. It also supports virtual environments.

The appliance is priced starting at $2,495 with 100 GB of capacity, with no limit on how many devices it can back up, Arman said. It is available only through solution providers, who can earn margins of 18 percent to 38 percent, Arman said.

Olaf Solutions, a Metarie, La.-based VAR, has already implemented several 3X appliances for customers ranging from a two-person air conditioning firm to a $40 million, 60-user company.

Dale Pinney, Olaf's president, said his company also keeps one in its own office in order to backup data for 10 other customers who prefer not to have their own appliance.

"We just passed our first anniversary of working with 3X," Pinney said. "We sent out notes telling customers about signing new support contracts, and no one said no. No one even asked questions about it. It's amazing. It's really telling me that customers are depending on 3X and know it's working for them."