EVault Scales Its Backup Appliances Up and Down

September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

EVault‘s line of backup appliances got a makeover recently, including a new high-end device that holds 38 TB of data, and a new low-end device that starts at a mere 500 GB.

EVault sells two lines of backup appliances, including its Plug-n-Protect (PnP) and its Express Recovery Appliance (ERA). In August, the company introduced two new high-end, rack-mountable PnP devices based on Windows Server 2008 R2, and two lower-end Windows 7-based devices delivered as towers, including one PnP and one ERA appliance.

The new enterprise-grade PnP3800 is EVault’s biggest appliance ever. The 3U device is equipped with 16 3-TB SATA drives with RAID6 protection, giving it a total capacity of 38 TB. The PnP2400, like the PNP3800, occupies 3U of rack space and is not expandable, but the 24 TB of capacity (delivered via 16 2-TB SATA drives with RAID6 striping) will be enough for many midsize organizations.

At the low end of the spectrum are EVault’s PnP100t and ERA 50t, both of which are entry points into their respective lines. The PnP100t can be expanded from 1 TB to hold up to 2 TB of data, while the new ERA 50t is delivers 500 GB of data and is not expandable.

The PnP line is designed to be an all-in-one backup appliance, and is equipped with full replication capabilities to move backups over the wire to EVault’s cloud, a business partner’s cloud, another appliance run by the customer, or all three, a capability introduced with EVault 7 a year ago.

The ERAs are designed for EVault SaaS deployments, and provide customers with a local cache of data to speed recoveries. Both of EVault’s appliance lines are pre-loaded with the EVault 7 software and OS-specific agents to pull backups from a variety of servers, including IBM i, Windows, Linux, and Unix servers.