Data protection developer StorServer is backing up its backup appliances with a guarantee that data backed up to the appliance can be recovered and will be useable after a loss.
That guarantee is unique in the data protection industry, said Jarrett Potts, director of strategic marketing for Colorado Springs, Colo.-based StorServer.
"I have a feeling this will blow out the market because no one else does this," Potts said. "You can get a guarantee from disk vendors because if a disk is bad, the data can still be read. But, there's no other guarantees from data protection and backup vendors."
[Related: Report: Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market Growth Surpasses Storage Software]
StorServer can offer such a guarantee because its appliance is built using IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) data protection technology, Potts said.
"TSM is an enterprise offering," he said. "We've masked the complexity of TSM and moved it into a 'bomb-proof' package with our own hardware and software. As long as someone doesn't do something they're not supposed to do, we will cover it."
The guarantee covers appliances sold after Feb. 1, including the company's Backup Appliance models BA601 and BA701, and its Enterprise Backup Appliance models EBA802, EBA1202, EBA2202, and EBA3202.
StorServer also provides its data protection technology as software that solution providers can download to customers' own hardware, as a cloud-based backup offering and as a virtual appliance. However, these are not covered by the guarantee.
Potts said that StorServer appliance restore failures seldom happen, and in the event of a failure, a support specialist will look to remedy the situation either by phone, dial in or physical support.
"If the situation is still not remedied, financial compensation will be given up to (but not limited to) the cost of the solution and its support," Potts wrote in an email to CRN.
StorServer is one of several manufacturers of data protection or backup appliances, which are servers pre-configured with data protection software. Because of the optimized hardware underlying the software, backup appliances typically offer higher performance than the same software run on general purpose servers.
As a result, the backup appliance market, while small, is growing faster than the data protection market as a whole, a situation that has led traditional data protection software-only vendors such as Symantec to offer their own backup appliance lines.
StorServer sells its data protection technology exclusively through indirect channels.
PUBLISHED JAN. 17, 2013
