Breece Hill Targets SMBs

Breece Hill has unveiled a combined-media data protection appliance targeted at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The company says its iStoRA 4000 data protection product offers disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) functionality for SMBs and departments within enterprises, with high-end features such as staged backup, rapid restore, and regulatory-compliant technology.

iStoRA 4000

Based on Breece Hill’s Information Storage and Retrieval Architecture, the iStoRA 4000 is a 4U rackmountable, combined-media data protection appliance for backup, recovery, and archival. The product features a 1.5 TB Serial ATA (SATA) disk array and a tape autoloader with a choice of tape formats and capacities up to 13 TB. It also integrates an Intel-based server with data protection software that performs policy- or rules-based data traffic and storage management.

Brian Babineau of the Enterprise Storage Group’s Enterprise Strategy Group says Breece Hill’s product announcement is “timely. There were no bigger user themes at the spring trade shows than the emerging trends in backup.”

Babineau says data protection “is clearly evolving from a less-frequent, tape-based process to a more-frequent, disk-based process.” An ESG survey found that 83% of enterprise users and 59% of mid-tier users have either already deployed or plan to purchase some form of disk-based data protection technology within the next two years.

The iStoRA 4000’s modular functionality is its “big differentiator,” Babineau told Enterprise Storage Forum.

Including disk and tape in the same appliance, with different configurations such as WORM and file recovery, “increases the customer appeal for the product.”

Dave Reine, director of enterprise systems at the Clipper Group, agrees that the iStoRA 4000 is a worthy offering.

“For about $19,000, Breece Hill will supply the $10 million to $50 million company with business continuance and cost reduction through ILM,” Reine told ESF. “It enables a company with a minimal IT staff to deploy an economical backup/recovery or archival solution easily.”

Breece Hill says the iStoRA 4000 costs $19,400 to $35,000, based on configuration choices.

The company also reports the appliance is the first in a family of products that will deliver disk-to-disk-to-removable storage. Future iStoRA products will “address a wide range of platforms and capacities to satisfy the data protection and storage management needs of the smallest companies and the largest organizations,” the company says.

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