Highly Reliable Systems Shipping Backup and DR NAS Appliance

Highly Reliable Systems, Inc. is shipping mirroring backup NAS appliances based on Windows Storage Server called the BNAS 401 Series.
 

The units are intended to allow customers to create their own Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) system by adding their choice of backup and virtualization software.

"Adding software such as ShadowProtect and VirtualBox gives the end user a combination NAS and emergency server that can spin up virtual backup images if the primary server goes down," said Tom Hoops, CTO.

Designed to keep it simple, each removable drive bay houses a single 3.5" (up to 4TB per bay for 8TB total).

The drives can be connected via iSCSI or standard network shares and can be used with most backup software. A third bay is provided to restore older, archived drives that have been stored off-site. Thus, restoring old data doesn’t impact the ongoing backup regimen.

Darren McBride, CEO, says that mirroring solves problems caused by drive swaps because the backup software isn’t aware when secondary drives are replaced. "One drive can be kept online and continuously updated (incremental backups), while the copy can be transported off-site or used to seed the remote location."

Available with i3 or Xeon CPUs, Windows Storage Server Workgroup or Standard, and varying amounts of RAM, the pricing on the 3-bay BNAS 401 starts at $1,889 MSRP.

Removable drives in  protected and transportable aluminum trays are used to populate each bay and start at $180 each.

Linux versions of the products with similar features are also sold under the  family name.