StorageCraft launches OneXafe scale-out backup appliances

StorageCraft has launched a series of converged primary, secondary and backup appliances for physical servers and VMware environments. The OneXafe series is built on scale-out NAS storage with the company’s ShadowXafe backup software on board.

OneXafe is an upgrade of StorageCraft’s existing OneBlox product. It will come as the spinning disk-equipped 4412 and 4417 and the all-flash 5410.

OneXafe boxes offer scale-out file access storage (onto an underlying object store) with a single parallel file system across all instances.

Each 4412 node can house up to 12 SATA or SAS hard disk drives (HDDs), while the 4417 can take up to 17. With 12TB drives, that makes for maximum raw capacities of 144TB and 204TB respectively.

A 5410 node can accommodate up to 10 2.5” solid-state drives SSDs for a maximum raw capacity of 38TB.

With StorageCraft’s ShadowXafe backup software on board, OneXafe nodes can be built into clusters of backup appliances married to secondary (HDD) or primary storage hardware.

Backed up data can be retained on OneXafe hardware or be staged off to the cloud, into StorageCraft’s disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering.

The StorageCraft product is the latest in an emerging class of backup appliances that merge backup software with storage hardware, but with scale-out capability.

Unlike standalone backup appliances, backup appliance nodes can be built out into grid-like clusters of backup/secondary storage capacity.

Key players are Rubrik and Cohesity, with established backup software makers CommVault and Veritas also getting onto the bandwagon.

OneXafe is a “mid-enterprise” play, according to product marketing director Florian Malecki.

“Customers can deploy OneXafe as pure primary or secondary storage, or add data protection alongside existing incumbent storage. HDD versions are aimed at the backup environment, unstructured data, archiving and CCTV, for example,” said Malecki.

The backup software component, ShadowXafe, is a revamp of the existing ShadowProtect. It protects data in physical server and VMware environments, with claimed “millisecond” recovery of virtual machines (VMs) and backup to the cloud possible.

ShadowXafe can be deployed independently of OneXafe and comes as a virtual appliance. Multiple ShadowXafe instances can be managed from StorageCraft’s OneSystem platform.