Buffalo boosts SMB appeal with NovaStor deal
Storage and wireless specialist Buffalo Technology is to offer a more SMB-focused backup and recovery solution alongside its Linkstation and Terastation products to help its channel sell into the competitive market.
The deal with NovaStor will mean that all the vendor's network attached storage (NAS) products will now include either five or 10 user licences for a NovaStor backup suite which includes snapshots and bare metal restore technology.
“This is a new direction for us,” explains Paul Hudson, Buffalo’s sales director for Northern Europe. “Traditionally we have only offered single user licences but with this deal we now offer the greatest level of functionality of any product within its class.”
The NovaBACKUP Business Essentials, which will be available on the vendor’s TeraStation devices, will include support for Microsoft Windows Server operating systems, Exchange and SQL Servers. With a full Open File Manager Agent and Bare Metal Restore (BMR) option, Hudson believes that Buffalo can now offer a viable business continuity solution for a 10 person site on device typically costing less than £700.
Hudson contends that feature richness and support for multiple users will allow its channel partners to actively pursue deals in larger environments. “There is potential for real value-add,” he comments, although he believes only around 50 percent of the firm's channel partners are actively targeting value-added SMB sales.
However, unlike rival Freecom who have started selling drive recovery service, and D-Link which has bundled cloud-based offsite storage alongside its US products, value added service is “not an area that Buffalo is focusing on at the moment”
The NovaStor software will be shipping on Buffalo NAS devices as of the end of June. The deal also coincides with a major price drop across every NAS unit “of up to three figures on our higher end Terastation models” which is kicking of this month, according to Hudson.
