Storage specialist Highly Reliable Systems (News - Alert) has released the NetSwap family of network-attached appliances, which provide reverse-cloud server backup for several bigwig data storage environments, like Amazon S3, Google (News - Alert) Cloud Storage, DreamHost DreamCloud and Dropbox.
Local storage of cloud server data provides insurance against Internet outages, malicious or accidental deletion, viruses or malware, and other cloud mishaps. To that end, NetSwap is a purpose-built backup appliance that allows bidirectional data replication.
Multiple accounts and S3 buckets can be pulled down to local disk, and automatically mirrored to a second highly-removable drive. NetSwap can also be used for local computer or server backup, and then configured to automatically upload the data back up to cloud accounts.
“Although redundant cloud storage is considered reasonably safe, cases exist where companies have been put out of business by hackers, bugs or accidents,” said Tom Hoops, CTO at Highly Reliable Systems. “Our NetSwap backup appliances allow corporate users to consolidate multiple Amazon S3 accounts and storage buckets onto our auto backup device. This gives administrators the physical comfort of having their data on one or more local hard drives.”
There’s also a regulatory and compliance dimension, he added.
“Some customers worry about compliance and long-term data retention for HIPAA, SOX, and other laws,” Hoops said. “Complying with discovery requests during lawsuits is made much easier with a local copy of the data and our appliance insures those copies are constantly updated, even when multiple sources are involved.”
As far as storage capacities, NetSwap supports up to 48TB. For those that need larger sizes, the company also offers 72TB on RAIDFrame models.
The NetSwap backup NAS device utilizes Gigabit Ethernet network attachment, and support for CIFS network shares, NFS Linux/Unix/VMware shares and iSCSI block level drive access. The integrated Watchdog circuitry monitors each NetSwap backup NAS, immediately notifying administrators whenever an alert occurs.
The company also said that NetSwap models with virtualization, enabling Amazon AWS virtual machines to be spun-up under Xen from within the appliance, will be added to the lineup soon.
“It makes sense for businesses with large amounts of data in the cloud to retain a local copy for both safety and high-speed access,” said Hoops.