StorageCraft Technology Corp. has added two new platforms to its portfolio of data protection and storage solutions for SMBs.
The first, called ShadowXafe, is a next-generation successor to StorageCraft’s familiar ShadowProtect BDR solution. Available immediately, it protects both physical and virtual machines and integrates optionally with StorageCraft’s disaster recovery-as-a-service solution. The system is designed to offer rapid recovery times as well, according to Shridar Subramanian, Draper, Utah-based StorageCraft’s vice president of marketing and product management.
“We can recover VMs, even if these are terabyte-sized VMs, in just milliseconds,” he says.
Unlike ShadowProtect, ShadowXafe provides agentless as well as agent-based protection for VMs. Agentless backup can be a simpler option for less performance-sensitive virtual workloads.
ShadowXafe’s most significant feature, however, is its management interface. Called OneSystem, the all-new console is designed to simplify BDR administration by streamlining the configuration process. Rather than decide which backup technology to apply to workloads on a case-by-case basis, technicians using the system can define data protection policies tailored to SLA requirements instead.
“Based on these policies, we actually make a bunch of decisions behind the scenes that alleviate a lot of steps from the administrator’s perspective,” Subramanian says. The upshot, he adds, is single-click setup, fewer setup errors, and more dependable SLA compliance. Once policies are in place, OneSystem enables single pane of glass management of protected workloads as well.
Though ShadowXafe shares code with ShadowProtect, it’s a new and distinct platform that will ultimately replace the older product.
“For the mid-term and the foreseeable future, we will be continuing to support as well as sell ShadowProtect,” Subramanian says. StorageCraft will encourage ShadowProtect users to switch to the newer system, however, and assist them in making that transition.
“We definitely do want our customers and partners to leverage those innovation points and move from ShadowProtect to ShadowXafe,” Subramanian says. “Having said that, we also want them to do it at their own time and as they get comfortable with it. There is an upgrade program and we do encourage them to move from one to the other.”
Also new from StorageCraft is a converged data storage and protection platform specifically targeted at midsize businesses. Called OneXafe and scheduled to ship in mid-September, the system combines BDR and DRaaS functionality with the scale-out OneBlox storage technology StorageCraft acquired in January 2017 along with Exablox Inc. The result is an all-in-one storage and backup solution complete with hardware, software, and both onsite and cloud-based repositories.
“It can be used for primary storage and secondary storage as well as for data protection,” Subramanian says. Acquiring that functionality in a pre-integrated package, he adds, frees organizations short on time and people from the hassles of assembling a storage and BDR environment by hand.
“We have taken away a bunch of their pain from them and created a single, unified, converged solution,” Subramanian says.
Unlike similar products from competing vendors, he continues, OneXafe lets users deploy as little as a single node with several terabytes of capacity initially. “Most of the other scale-out vendors require you to start with either three or four nodes,” Subramanian says. OneXafe scales incrementally and non-disruptively to multiple petabytes, he adds.
Like ShadowXafe, OneXafe utilizes the OneSystem management interface. According to StorageCraft, it can recover terabyte-scaled virtual machines in under a second.
At launch, users will have three OneXafe SKUs to choose from: the all-flash OneXafe 5410, which is optimized for server virtualization, VDI, and other high-performance use cases, and the slower but more affordable OneXafe 4412 and 4417, which are designed for use as unstructured data archives and video storehouses. StorageCraft will add further OneXafe SKUs within roughly the next six months.
Pricing on the OneXafe 5410 starts under $30,000. The OneXafe 4412 and 4417 list at $14,000 and up. According to Subramanian, those prices are a fit for the platform’s target market.
“We are designed for the midsize enterprise and we are priced for the midsize enterprise,” he says.
Buyers must pay for OneXafe hardware upfront, but can buy the other elements of the product either on a subscription basis or via perpetual licensing. ShadowXafe offers subscription-based and perpetual licensing as well.
Going forward, according to Subramanian, StorageCraft will position ShadowXafe as the platform of choice for businesses at the smaller end of the SMB scale and encourage larger SMBs to buy OneXafe.
“If a company has somewhere between tens to hundreds of VMs and machines that need to be protected, ShadowXafe is an ideal solution,” he says. “For the midsize enterprise that typically goes from the high hundreds of VMs to thousands of VMs, OneXafe is the ideal solution.”
OneXafe is but the latest StorageCraft solution to utilize OneBlox arrays. A scale-out video storage solution for law enforcement agencies debuted in March and a similar offering for education customers arrived last month.
