EMC (NYSE: EMC) recently unpacked a new purpose-built backup and recovery appliance aimed at midmarket customers to be sold only by its Velocity program channel partners. The vendor is positioning the Avamar Business Edition as retaining the functionality and enterprise-class capabilities of prior versions — specifically its straightforward management, network and storage features.

Backup and recovery historically has served as an initial point of entry for EMC into new enterprise accounts, a sales strategy the vendor now is modifying to help channel partners expand their marketing reach to midmarket customers. One notable competitive advantage of the Avamar unit, which can house up to 7.8TB of usable, deduplicated backup capacity, are features aimed to attract a broader selection of customers. Midmarket customers, in particular, may cotton to its deduplication to open more storage space, reduce latency and improve system performance.

Avamar Business Edition adds to the vendor’s VNXe and Data Domain DD160 systems as products available exclusively through EMC Velocity partners. According to EMC, all of its channel-specific products are designed, sized and priced to maximize partners’ opportunities to sell unified and deduplication storage solutions to midmarket customers.

One key reason Avamar is well-suited for midmarket customers lies in its simplicity: Users need not integrate separate hardware and software elements. The model initially was developed for traditional backup, but now offers daily full backups for virtualized environments, NAS systems, desktops/laptops, remote offices and business-critical applications.

“Unlike competing midmarket solutions that treat software and storage acquisition and implementation as two separate initiatives, Avamar Business Edition delivers a complete, easy-to-deploy, end-to-end solution that integrates industry-leading backup software and deduplication storage,” said Shane Jackson, EMC Backup and Recovery Systems Division marketing vice president.

Avamar Business Edition will be offered as part of EMC’s VSPEX Proven Infrastructure reference architectures. A 3.9TB version also is available through channel partners.