Buffalo Americas has shipped a set of network-attached storage arrays for SMBs with built-in snapshotting technology.
Buyers of products in the new TeraStation 6000 family can use that functionality to recover individual files or entire images in far less time than is typically required when restoring from an external backup solution, according to Ben DeLaurier, director of technical support at Buffalo.
“Recovering from snapshot is very fast,” he says. “You can in fact revert the whole array back to a point in time more or less instantly.”
Businesses that configure the system to bar changes to snapshots can also use the functionality to protect local backup data from encryption by ransomware. “If you have it set to where you lock snapshots, then the system won’t allow you to overwrite them,” DeLaurier notes.
Additional features in the new product family include the ability to backup data from one array to another elsewhere on that network. That allows organizations to keep data available even if its primary storage device experiences mechanical failure.
Duplex firmware technology in the TeraStation 6000 maintains a second copy of the system’s operating system in NAND flash memory for emergency use when booting from the unit’s hard drive isn’t possible due to corruption or a hardware problem.
According to DeLaurier, TeraStation 6000s can help organizations extend the capacity and improve the performance of high-priced, high-speed storage systems by offloading less-frequently accessed files to more affordable hardware. “Not every data set has to be on an extremely fast storage array,” he observes. “Most of the data can be on something that is much slower, higher density, and costs considerably less, and that’s where we come in.”
TeraStation 6000 devices are VMware certified, DeLaurier continues, making them a cost-effective iSCSI expansion solution for virtual machines. “It’s a very simple solution,” he says. “You can essentially instantly add very dense, very high value storage to your virtualized environment without spending a lot of money on, say, a very expensive all-flash device.”
TeraStation 6000 units are available in both desktop and rackmount form factors, each of which come in models that support either four 4TB SATA drives or four 8TB SATA drives. Powered by an Intel Atom C3538 processor, the devices contain 8GB of DDR4 memory with integrated error correction.
MSRPs for the new systems begin at $1,831.99 for a desktop SKU with 16TB of capacity and top out at $2,947.99 for rackmount arrays with space for 32TB of data. Buffalo expects street pricing for the product line to range from $1,429.99 to $2,299.99.
TeraStation 6000 devices are eligible for the free data recovery service Buffalo announced a year ago, which lets users restore data from hard drives impacted by basic logical failures, provided they register the device within its original warranty terms.
