3X: Sophisticated Backup for Mid-Market and SME

I talked with CEO Alan Arman today of 3X Systems. 3X provides remote backup appliances for SME and mid-market customers. I admit to some confusion at first because I assumed that 3X backed up to a co-located site as do many of their competitors. No; the 3X appliance is owned by the customer and used at their site for remote backup and recovery. 3X provides its own backup software, hardware, data transfer acceleration and policy engine for Windows environments. Backup occurs over broadband and operates as a secondary server and data recovery site under the customer’s direct control.

The appliance is directed to distributed organizations. We’re used to thinking of “distributed” in the context of “large enterprise” but many mid-market companies have more than one location. Branch offices, retail stores, traveling and remote workers: all of their machines require efficient and regular backup. There are also applications and environments that are challenging to backup without specialized backup administrators, such as Exchange or VMware. In response 3X offers a series of backup appliances for remote backup using broadband.

As a best practice, 3X suggests running the initial backup over the LAN as a seed backup. The appliance may at any time be moved to a secondary site and administrators will schedule remote backups from then on. They may also use a USB device to operate a seed backup from a single machine at any time, and export the contents into the 3X vault.

The appliance has some fancy features that I like a good deal.

• Locator Service. This optional service enables client machines to locate the appliance after it has been moved to a different location. This commonly occurs when a company has attached the 3X to a LAN for a seed backup and then moved it to a secondary location for remote backups. Administrators may choose to use the Locator Service to avoid re-configuring endpoints. 3X hosts the Locator Service, which uses a security key to authenticate incoming data from client backup sources.
• Granular and bare metal recovery. 3X enables bare metal recovery of a single machine using a system image. This allows administrators to recover applications and system settings as well as backed up data, a great advantage when it comes to recovering or replacing a computer. 3X also provides brick-level backup and recovery for MS Exchange. Administrators can recover discrete Exchange data such as mailboxes or messages without having to recover entire Exchange systems.
• Virtual network support. I particularly like this feature for mid-market and SME. A number of companies have put in pilot installations of virtual networks but still struggle with virtual backup requirements. 3X backs up virtual machine (VM) images, enabling efficient backup for VMware, Oracle and Microsoft virtualization customers.
• Backup acceleration and space savings. Initial large or full backups are best done over the LAN but 3X accelerates subsequent remote backups done over broadband. This protects backup window service agreements and makes third-party accelerator purchases unnecessary. Once the data reaches the appliance, the 3X provides up to 10TB useable storage space on the Enterprise Series. Native space-saving storage technology includes de-duplication and compression, common file elimination and block-level delta backups.
• Security and data protection. 3X provides in-transit SSL encryption and at-rest security options. The latter includes AES encryption, digital access keys, hardware signatures, IP filtering and administrator authorization. Additional data protection includes RAID-based redundancy and the option to backup the appliance to a USB.
• Supports regulatory compliance. Data remains under the organization’s direct control and encryption options meet regulations. Prime examples include HIPAA and HITECH for healthcare, SOX for the financial sector and PCI DSS for businesses accepting payment cards.
• Cost-effective. 3X customers own the appliance which eliminates the monthly costs of online hosting with third parties. For example, 3X stacks itself up against close competitor MozyPro. 3X takes a larger initial outlay than MozyPro’s monthly service charge. But after 3 years, 3X comes in at a quarter of what MozyPro would have charged for the same volume of stored data. This is an extremely significant savings.

My only caveat with the announcement is 3X’s “private cloud” terminology. I grant you that the market-wide “cloud” designation is imprecise at best, but is usually taken to mean either application delivery over the Internet or remote data hosting by a third party. There is however a third meaning where an individual company operates a private cloud in the sense of a utility computing center. This center by definition offers a high rate of automation and hands-off data protection and can accept data transfers from multiple clients over the Internet.

In this sense 3X meets the definition but I am concerned that the “private cloud” designation will lead people to assume that it is a hosted storage model. On the other hand this may present an opportunity for 3X’s thought leadership where the private cloud expands to include companies not relying on hosted services.

Terminology aside, I was very impressed with 3X’s automated and remote capabilities for Windows servers and workstations. It is a highly cost-effective way to provide sophisticated remote backup services across a distributed company, and is highly attractive in Windows environments. I look forward to 3X’s further progress and developments.