Backup hardware devices: 2018 Products of the Year finalists
Some finalists in the 2018 Products of the Year backup hardware category aim to entice data-rich SMBs, or carve their niche by branching out beyond backup and recovery.
The backup hardware devices category of Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2018 Products of the Year competition encompasses all devices that serve as targets for backed up data. This includes stand-alone disk and tape systems, backup software integrated with hardware appliances and gateway appliances for cloud backup and replication.
Continuing a trend from the previous year, many of the 2018 finalists feature powerful backup software integrated into hardware appliances, especially in the area of ransomware detection. Some backup hardware devices provide more than just backup and disaster recovery capabilities, extending into data management and data discovery.
Asigra TrueNAS Backup Appliance
Asigra partnered with TrueNAS to create this integrated backup appliance. Ransomware detection is unique in that it identifies and quarantines unauthorized encryptions before they get backed up. It can also find infections in old backup files.
Cohesity DataPlatform (software version Pegasus 6.0.1)
The latest version of Cohesity's consolidated secondary data platform, this product combines data management and data protection. This update to Cohesity DataPlatform introduced automated capacity planning based on service-level agreement requirements.
Commvault HyperScale Appliance (HS1300)
Designed for IT generalists, this hyper-converged data management appliance has a simple interface and seamlessly integrates with over 200 storage arrays, hypervisors, applications and cloud providers. By tightly integrating storage, server and the Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery backup software, the HyperScale Appliance HS1300 aims to eliminate the need for IT professionals to build infrastructure piecemeal.
Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance (DP4400)
Among the backup hardware devices, the Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) DP4400 from Dell EMC delivers a complete backup and recovery package in a 2U rack-mounted appliance, and includes deduplication, replication and recovery. One of IDPA DP4400's main selling points is its cloud readiness, providing simple cloud failover and failback without the need for a cloud gateway device.
Infinidat InfiniGuard
Using Infinidat patented Neural Cache machine learning algorithm and built on the vendor's InfiniBox chassis, InfiniGuard focuses on high availability and fast data restores. It supports Commvault, Veritas, Veeam, IBM Spectrum Protect, SAP, Oracle RMAN, VMware and Microsoft Exchange.
Quantum Converged Tape Appliance for Veeam Environments
Quantum is one of the few backup hardware devices that still innovate in tape, and is the first tape appliance on the market with built-in compute power. The Converged Tape Appliance takes Quantum's Scalar i3 tape library and directly integrates a blade server preloaded with Veeam-ready software, allowing for fast and easy tape creation in a Veeam environment.
Qumulo Nearline Archive Series
Archive data is cheap to store and slow to recall, but this backup hardware is built to access archived data quickly, boasting speeds of 5 GB reads and 2.5 GB writes per 1 PB usable capacity. The Qumulo Nearline Archive Series also has high storage density: Its 1U form factor holds 12 TB HDDs and three 800 GB SSDs.
Rubrik Cloud Data Management (Alta 4.1)
Focused on the cloud and updated from Alta 4.0 since last year's competition, this latest installment of Rubrik Cloud Data Management, Alta 4.1, adds support for Google Cloud Platform, Azure Stack and Amazon Glacier.
StorageCraft OneXafe (models 5410, 4412 and 4417)
StorageCraft positions itself in the category of backup hardware devices as a low-cost, high-value vendor, and OneXafe targets mid-market organizations by offering affordable scale-out, object-based storage. This backup hardware is highly configurable, useable as primary or secondary storage, and comes with an optional DRaaS component from StorageCraft.
Synology RackStation RS2818RP+
Designed as a disaster recovery gateway, this backup hardware serves as a target for backup data that then replicates it to off-site servers or cloud storage services. The Synology RackStation RS2818RP+ easily integrates with C2 Backup, Synology's cloud storage service, allowing for a complete cloud-based DR package from a single vendor.
Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliances Gen 8
The Recovery Series appliances from Unitrends feature machine learning-based ransomware detection, recovery time objective or recovery point objective-based policy automation, automated recovery tests and "self-healing disks" that can predict hardware failure before it happens. Unitrends tries to offer a complete on-premises-to-cloud package at every price point, which is why there are 15 models in this series, ranging from 2 TB to 120 TB of usable capacity.
