Arcserve has added a new subscription option to StorageCraft Cloud Services, its cloud-based BDR offering.
Called StorageCraft Cloud Services Basic, the new plan is designed to provide an affordable way to protect endpoints an SMB doesn’t need to recover immediately after an outage or ransomware attack.
“Not all data is equal,” says Shridar Subramanian, Arcserve’s CMO.
Like the two previously available StorageCraft Cloud Services plans, called Cloud Plus and Cloud Premium, Cloud Basic comes with three daily recovery points and two weekly recovery points. Users can also pool data in excess of the solution’s per-device limit across multiple machines without incurring overage charges.
Unlike earlier options, however, Cloud Basic includes 500 GB of capacity per machine instead of 1 TB, and only supports recovery from local hardware via a bare metal restore (BMR) drive. Cloud Plus users, by contrast, can download specific files and folders from the cloud immediately, while Cloud Premium users can virtualize endpoints in the cloud instantaneously.
Subscribers pay $20 per machine for Cloud Basic, which includes an on-premises license for Arcserve’s ShadowXafe or ShadowProtect BDR software. That’s significantly below Cloud Plus rates and less than a third what Cloud Premium coverage costs.
“You’re looking at a significant discount,” Subramanian says, which makes safeguarding all of a client’s machines, instead of just the most mission-critical ones, cost-effective for businesses leery of overspending on BDR in the past. “They want to be able to protect everything and recover everything,” he notes.
Businesses can mix and match service plans as well, Subramanian adds, assigning Premium-level coverage to the most important machines, Plus-level coverage to somewhat less critical systems, and Basic-level coverage to machines that don’t require immediate recovery. The latter category includes laptops and other PCs used in work-from-home settings, he continues. “They want to make sure that all of those things are protected, and with this they can definitely do that.”
Access to a new entry-level Cloud Services tier benefits MSPs as well, according to Subramanian, by enabling them to provide more comprehensive BDR coverage and collect more BDR revenue. “This expands the [total addressable market] and the number of machines that the MSPs can protect,” he says. “They can now protect pretty much the entire spectrum of servers.”
Arcserve and StorageCraft announced a definitive agreement to join forces under Arcserve’s brand as one company offering comprehensive BDR and archiving solutions at a wide range of price points in February. David Hansen, Arcserve’s board chair, stepped into the role of interim CEO earlier this month following the departure of former CEO Tom Signorello.
