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zBox = local network storage + Amazon S3

By Vivek Puri | October 23rd, 2006 at 09:13 pm ET         

 Zettabytestorage has launched a new network attached storage device zBox which automatically backs up the data onto Amazon S3 storage. zBox is optimized to handle data accesses faster and can be accessed from any computer on your local network. Unlike any other local storage device from Maxtor or Seagate which usually don’t encrypt your data, zBox will encrypt all the data that you save on the disk using AES-256 encryption algorithm. Once you hook up zBox to your network you can easily drag and drop files to the drive. Once the data is on zBox, it transparently backs up the data onto the S3 servers. Advantage of this option is that the backup to S3 servers will not slowdown your machine and you don’t need to have your machine running when the backup to S3 takes place. Also you don’t need to schedule backups since all the data on zBox automatically backs up to S3.

zBox seems to have borrowed one of the best ideas from EMC. zBox has self-monitoring feature and will notify you in case it the disk is going to fail. Best part is that in case of unexpected hardware failure, Zettabytestorage will replace the zBox and refund you a full week’s worth of service for every day your data is unavailable.

Zettabytestorage comes in 2 service plans, Zettabits and Zettabits Pro. Zettabits is aimed at single user and small office users and can handle upto 5 simultaneous users, while Zettabits Pro can handle 5-100 simultaneous users. Zettabits Pro has RAID-1 internal disk mirror for added redundancy. As for the pricing, Zettabits is available from 30 GB storage for $49/month upto 690 GB storage for $299/month, and Zettabits Pro is available from 140 GB storage for $199/month upto 690 GB storage for $499/month. As it looks from the product pricing, you don’t really need to pay extra for the S3 storage.

All the options and features are great, but I feel that zBox should be great option for teams who don’t want to risk having just a local copy of their backups, but is bit too expensive for an individual user. Alternative option to zBox can be Mirra Personal Server which provides 320 GB capacity for $499.99. Using Mirra combined with Amazon S3 you won’t have to pay for the S3 bandwidth and storage up-front and will be able to extract the true value of S3. Again, you need to go through quite a few hoops to get this Mirra with S3 working and also don’t get the data encryption, whereas zBox provides out of the box functionality.

Links:
Zettabytestorage

 

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