Exabyte, Adaptec, BakBone Together For D2D2T Appliance

Adaptec, Milpitas, Calif., is providing its Snap Server storage appliance; Boulder, Colo.-based Exabyte a tape autoloader; and San Diego-based BakBone Software the backup software.

Kelly Beavers, vice president of product marketing at Exabyte, said the three vendors worked together to make an appliance made of components that fit seamlessly with each other.

Harlan Blatman, solution specialist with Innovative Systems and Solutions, a Little Falls, N.J.-based solution provider, said having a pre-packaged solution is ideal for his small business customers. The alternative, said Blatman, would be to put together his own solution. "Instead of wondering if it works, it will work," he said.

Disk-to-disk-to-tape solutions are a no-brainer solution for many customers, Blatman said. "It gives redundancy by copying data to disk, and then allows backing up data to tape," he said.

The possibility of actually cutting tape out of the backup solution and just backing data up to disk is appealing to many customers, especially as hard drive costs fall, said Blatman. However, he said, the new bundle puts 160 Gbytes on each of up to 10 removable tapes, which can be taken offsite.

The appliance comes in three versions.

The entry version includes a Snap Server 4200 with 640 Gbytes of capacity, a 2.0GHz Celeron processor, iSCSI target management, and integrated anti-virus software. The tape portion is an Exabyte VXA PacketLoader with one VXA tape drive and room for ten tapes. The software is BakBone's NetVault D2D2T software with a 12-slot license. List price is $6,500.

At the high-end, the package includes an Adaptec Snap Server 4500 NAS with 1.6 Tbytes of capacity and a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 processor, and a seven-slot Exabyte LTO autoloader.

They are available immediately only through the channel.