DattoCon 2016: 5 Take-Aways That Partners Should Know About Right Now

New And Improved

Data protection provider Datto Tuesday unveiled a series of feature enhancements, a new cloud pricing plan, and a refreshed product line during its annual partner conference, DattoCon 2016.

Founded in 2007, Norwalk, Conn.-based Datto established its channel program in 2013. Since then, the company has been focused on hybrid cloud backup and disaster recovery, delivering its offerings exclusively to IT service providers and managed service providers.

Mark Kulacz, Datto's director of product marketing and competitive intelligence, sat down with CRN to share the news coming out of this week's event. Here are five take-aways from the event.

Siris 3

Datto introduced the third iteration of its storage and networking device, Siris 3. The latest version of Siris is a complete data backup solution that includes a disaster recovery as a service component, Kulacz said.

Datto’s Siris 3 appliances come complete with 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and the latest generation of Intel Xeon CPUs. Datto also is upgrading Siris 3 to Ubuntu OS 16.04 and to the KVM hypervisor for both performance and security enhancements, the company said.

Siris 3 Form Factors

There are three ways partners can access the refreshed Siris 3 offering, Kulacz said. Solution providers can purchase the Siris 3 hardware appliance, the virtualized version of Siris 3, or in a do-it-yourself fashion called Siris Image. With this model, partners can use their own hardware to access all of the Siris 3 features for a monthly fee.

Siris 3 X1

In addition to the hardware-based Siris 3 model, Datto unveiled Siris 3 X1, its first all-flash backup device.

The Siris 3 X1 has a 1-TB solid-state drive and 16 GB of RAM, and can perform local virtualization directly on the appliance.

"The Siris 3 X1 demonstrates that we understand the future is going in the direction of flash, so we decided to introduce our first all-flash offering," Kulacz said.

Siris Feature Enhancements

In addition to new form factors, Datto introduced a series of new capabilities for its Siris product line. The enhancements include:

-- Backup agents for MAC OS endpoints for the first time

-- Support for both agent and agentless backups for systems running VMware hypervisors

-- The addition of NAS and iSCSI support and hybrid virtualization -- which was previously only available on the Datto Alto, its backup product for small businesses -- as well as Linux backup screenshot verification

New Cloud Storage Pricing Model

Datto also took the wraps off a new cloud storage pricing model, Infinite Cloud Retention. Using ICR, a monthly pricing plan, partners don't have to consider how long each individual backup will be retained. Datto partners can now store backup data indefinitely in Datto’s cloud, Kulacz said.

"For a set price, partners are covered regardless of how much data change occurs, without having to worry about data growth and all the complexities it can cause," he said. "A lot of the guesswork is removed."