Tandberg Extends Data Protection Offerings

Primarily focused on data protection within the SMB market, Tandberg Data has been extending its reach outside its tape roots for the last several years, and is taking a big step forward with its latest products, including its first unified NAS and SAN appliance and new backup and recovery software, says McClain Buggle, Product Director in charge of disk.

While not prepared to write off tape as some have, Buggle acknowledges that the tape market has experienced some decline. “Customers understood us as a data protection company from a disaster recovery perspective, so we needed to come out with solutions complementary to offsite storage and disaster recovery, so that’s what we’re trying to do with disk.”

Billed as a flexible, powerful and affordable family of disk systems, the DPS2000 NAS Series will provide automated data protection, including cross-platform file sharing, consolidated iSCSI storage, improved backup and recovery capabilities and remote replication for offsite data storage and disaster recovery when coupled with Tandberg’s AccuGuard backup and recovery software.

Available in March in a desktop configuration with 4TB or a 1U rackmount configuration with either 4TB or 8TB, it features both file-level access and block-level storage and as many as eight, unique iSCSI targets can be maintained simultaneously, allowing users to extend local storage for multiple servers without system disruption.

Tandberg’s direction is to be the data protection provider to SMBs, so when it brings out a NAS solution, it has to have all usual features, plus the data protection focus, says Buggle. “The product is built on key features that support maximum uptime and support data protection to a further degree… it’s the total package of these features.”

The NAS data protection opportunity is huge, he adds. “Only 30 percent of NAS customers use a NAS data protection solution, which means 70 percent don’t.”

Tandberg Data AccuGuard is an easy-to-deploy, “set-it-and-forget-it” backup and recovery software solution that protects physical and virtual Windows servers,” he said. Using source-based deduplication – deduplication of data by identifying and removing redundant data prior to storage – optimizes bandwidth, allowing daily backups to run as much as 20 times more efficiently. And backup verification ensures that every file is saved correctly and without corruption and that stores are searchable down to the version level for quick file discovery.

Buggle believes AccuGuard is positioned well for the SMB market, which is largely Windows based. “This software is going to be very much the glue to the appliances that we have out as well as the products we’re bringing out.”

It features a single-pane interface so everything is extremely simple, extremely easy to use and it will be included in all of its channel SKUs, including RDX.

That’s the other new addition to the Tandberg portfolio, the RDX QuikStor cartridge-based removable disk storage system that transfers data as fast as 162GB per hour and is available with as much as combined with AccuGuard, improves backup windows and optimizes and increases storage capacity.

AccuGuard will be available in March and will ship together with the DPS2000 and RDX QuikStor systems. MSRP of the RDX QuikStor with AccuGuard starts at $169 (drive only), with cartridge prices ranging from $126 for 80GB, to $413 for the 640GB. The DPS2000 NAS Series with AccuGuard starts at $2,290 for 4TB.