Datto Inc. has added new products and capabilities to its business continuity software and hardware lineup, including a significantly accelerated edition of its cloud backup solution and new stand-alone and rack-mounted versions of its all-flash storage appliances.
The Norwalk, Conn.-based BDR vendor announced those updates on the first day of its 2017 North American DattoCon event, which is currently underway in Denver.
Named Datto SaaS Protection, the new cloud backup offering is based on the IRIS architecture that underlies Datto’s onsite appliances. At present, the system protects Microsoft Office 365 deployments only. Datto will add support for Google’s G Suite as well this summer.
According to Datto, the new solution copies and restores data significantly more quickly than Datto’s Backupify cloud backup service and is 7.5 times faster than its nearest competitor.
“It’s lightning fast,” said founder and CEO Austin McChord during a keynote address this morning.
SaaS Protection will gradually replace Backupify, which Datto acquired late in 2014, over the course of the year. Datto will continue to use the Backupify brand, though not the legacy product’s code base, with a limited set of its largest customers.
McChord also revealed this morning that a SaaS Protection appliance is currently in the works. When introduced later this year, the new system will let businesses leverage all of the functionality in the hosted edition of the product via an on-premises device they can control fully in their own data center. The appliance will be powered by latest-generation Intel Xeon processors and utilize Intel’s recently introduced Optane high-speed storage technology.
“This is a true enterprise-grade product,” McChord said.
Also announced this morning were additions to the all-flash SIRIS 3 X BDR appliance line that Datto first unveiled at last year’s North America DattoCon, including a new 4 TB model and a new SIRIS 3 X Professional product family. 1U rack-mounted devices designed for use in data centers and network closets, SIRIS 3 X Professional units come in 4, 8, and 12 TB SKUs.
The last update to Datto’s hardware portfolio unveiled this morning was a refreshed version of the ALTO backup appliance for small businesses. The first major update to that product since 2014, the new ALTO 3 features a Seagate FireCuda drive that combines both NAND flash and traditional HDD technology in one package. That and other enhancements, Datto says, enable the ALTO 3 to offer twice the performance and storage space of its predecessor.
“It’s much more powerful and it has a lot more capacity,” McChord said during his keynote. Like the ALTO 2, however, it’s available free with a 1-year upfront commitment.
Enhancements to the software platform underlying Datto’s SIRIS appliances announced today include a new “fast failback” feature that utilizes a “rescue agent” to backup production servers and temporary virtual servers simultaneously. Drawing on that capability, users can copy data from VMs to production servers ready to be put back into service without bringing the production server down, resulting in failback processes that take no longer than a quick reboot rather than multiple hours to complete.
Datto has also added the ability to virtualize backup machines directly into Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. That feature gives users a third virtualization option on top of the open source KVM hypervisor that SIRIS appliances use natively and VMware’s ESX platform.
Elsewhere at DattoCon today, Datto rolled out a new marketing automation platform for its partners and announced that it’s adding RMM integration and a new managed power strip to its networking product line.
DattoCon, which drew over 1,000 partner attendees this year, concludes tomorrow. Datto disclosed this morning that it will hold next year’s North American edition of the event in Austin, Texas.
