EVault Revs Backup Appliances, Drops Prices

March 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

EVault last week began shipments of a new generation of dedicated backup appliances that feature upgraded hardware and EVault’s version 7 software. The new boxes are not only faster, but they consume 30 percent less power. Thanks to an upgrade to latest EVault 7 software, the device provides customers with better resilience through support for tertiary backups. And the company has also dropped the price of the appliances by 33 percent.

EVault sells two backup devices: the Plug-n-Protect device, which scales from 3 TB to 24 TB and is designed to hold full backups, and the Express Recovery Appliance, which scales from 1 TB to 6 TB and is designed to store incremental, or weekly, backups.

With version 7, both devices have been overhauled by the Seagate subsidiary. The rack-mounted Express Recovery Appliances are smaller, which corresponds with a 30 percent decrease in power consumption, the company says. The larger Plug-n-Protect device is designed with a second X86 processor and a memory upgrade to 64 GB. The single-processor Express Recovery appliance got a memory boost from 2 GB to 8 GB.

The devices are preloaded with EVault version 7 software, which the company released in September. EVault 7 is important because it removes a limitation that prevented the software from automatically generating and synchronizing a third copy of backups for customers, which could be stored on another appliance, EVault’s cloud, or a third-party service provider, such as VAULT400 and others. See “EVault Delivers Backup Flexibility with Release 7” for more information.

EVault dropped the price of its 6TB Plug-n-Protect appliance to $19,995 through March.

EVault has also simplified licensing with the version 7 devices. Each appliance now comes with a selection of backup agents and plug-ins, including the IBM i backup agent. The agents were freely available for downloads before, but pre-loading them onto the appliance makes it easier.

Adding capacity to the appliances is also easier, now that EVault ships extra drives in each unit. For example, the Plug-n-Protect 3 TB device ships with 8 TB of storage, and the 12 TB device ships with 24 TB. Customers can unlock the extra capacity by buying an additional license.

In the four years that EVault has been shipping appliances, it has garnered about 1,500 customers, out of 38,000 total EVault customers, according to product manager Karen Jaworski.

Jaworski says the typical appliance customer has enough data–usually around 300 to 400 GB–that a full restoration of the backup would be too time consuming over the Internet, even with multiple T1 lines. Keeping the data onsite allows these customers to restore at much faster LAN speeds. Customers with even slower network connections may opt to go the appliance route with as little as 100 GB of data.

The EVault appliances give customers all kinds of options to protect their data, including replicating backups from one device to another, or replicating to cloud repositories run by EVault or one of its partners. The devices also include encryption, compression, and de-duplication capabilities.

EVault’s new Express Recovery Appliance scales from 1TB to 6TB, and is designed to hold about a week’s worth of backups from IBM i and other systems.

IBM i shops get particularly good returns with the EVault compression and de-duplication routines, Jaworski says. “We can get tremendous compression in an iSeries environment; 90 to 95 percent of a footprint can be compressed out. There’s a lot of white space in those types of deployments, and we de-dupe inside that.”

EVault is selling its appliances up against other disk-based backup devices, including virtual tape libraries (VTLs) and data de-duplication appliances. Jaworski says that the built-in failover and replication capabilities of the EVault appliances set it apart from VTLs.

EVault has lowered the pricing for its appliances by 33 percent. On top of this reduction, it is having a sale through the end of the month, and customers can get a 6 TB Plug-n-Protect device for $19,995; the 3 TB model has a price tag of $17,995. For more information, see www.evault.com.

This article was corrected. The 33 percent price drop on the EVault appliances is permanent. IT Jungle regrets the error.

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