Datto’s SIRIS 3 Line Goes Live, Offers MSPs More Flexible Options

Written by Lynn Haber
June 21 2016 @ 05:01

Lynn Haber **Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services.**

Some 700 MSPs in attendance Tuesday at DattoCon 2016 were privy to the introduction of the SIRIS 3 X1, the vendor’s first all-flash backup appliance. Datto partners also heard company executives announce the availability of the SIRIS 3 family for data protection and business continuity.

The fourth annual DattoCon partner conference is being held June 20-22, in Nashville.

Datto's Sue Mosovich A new addition to the SIRIS 3 line is the SIRIS X1, an all-flash backup and disaster recovery (BDR) device with a 1TB solid-state drive and 16GB of RAM packaged in a small form factor. The new one drive device, which protects one node, offers the same features as other SIRIS family of devices, according to the company.

“We’ve seen the interest level go up and the cost come down, for flash to finally make it fiscally logical for us to create an all-flash BDR device,” said Sue Mosovich, principal technology marketing engineer at Datto, who noted that the X1 provides a lot of power, protection, speed and functionality.

Current SIRIS 2 customers will have the option of upgrading their devices as will customers with Virtual SIRIS, Virtual Alto and Genisis products. However, after today, those lines will be discontinued as Datto pushes out the SIRIS 3 products, according to Mosovich.{ad}

MSPs will find a number of added capabilities and functionality to the latest upgrade to the SIRIS platform, the SIRIS 3. Here are some changes to watch for:

The ability to have multiple platform protection, i.e. physical, virtual and imaged platforms for increased flexibility and choice in the way they opt to implement their business continuity/disaster recovery infrastructure
Operating-system support has been expanded to include a Mac agent – for endpoint protection of Mac laptops and servers – in addition to existing Windows and Linux support. Datto also announced expanded functionality of the Linux agent to the disaster-recovery confirmation tools, such as snapshot screenshot confirmation.
Customers will now be able to carve the SIRIS devices into shares and move that share to the cloud, providing increased flexibility.
The vendor also added agentless backup for physical and virtual nodes.
Users will be able to do restores to iSCSI targets.
Datto has added hybrid virtualization, which allows a user to bring up a node in the cloud, yet manage it locally.

The vendor is offering a new billing model by adding …

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… an additional option called Infinite Cloud.

“This allows users to store data in the Datto cloud as long as they maintain Datto service,” Mosovich told us.

The new billing option is geared to helping companies meet regulatory requirements by holding onto their data for a long time.

Last year Datto talked about the intent to offer a product that offers continuously availability, which is in line with the company’s strategic vision for business continuity. Coming soon, the company said, is the Datto Networking Appliance (DNA), with integrated 4G services for always-on availability. DNA is a Wi-Fi router as well as a physical one with Internet connections, a firewall and 4G LTE failover.

“We realized that … there is a single point of failure when it comes to sending data to Internet, to the cloud for ongoing restorability and it was always the network, it’s always the Internet component of this,” said Mosovich. “When customers had a failed local network they were exposed to potential data loss,” she added.

With DNA, Datto wants to ensure customers have on going connectivity to the Internet and SaaS applications. To meet that objective, DNA connects to a Verizon cellular contract owned by Datto – no need for a customer contract – and Datto will not charge overages, unlike competitors who may offer a 4G LTE link but do not have a contract included in the offering, nor is it MSP-ready, according to the vendor.

Finally, for MSP partners, Datto updated its existing cloud-based management console for remote management to include the new appliance. Partners also get a portal view for fleet management or managing multiple clients.