For less than the price of a cup of coffee per month, you can save a gigabyte of data – as long as it’s stored locally. At least, that’s the pitch behind Storage Guardian‘s new local backup offering, which starts pricing at $0.25/compressed GB/month.  The company says it’s designed to enhance their cloud play, not replace it. Here’s how.

First and foremost, Storage Guardian’s press release indicates that the company sees the local backup solution as a cheap, agentless alternative to legacy tape backup systems. Moreover, Storage Guardian sees a potential for keeping local backups of important, of-accessed data and lessening WAN traffic and costs associated with it – with other data staying offsite and online.

Other than the fact that it works locally rather than with the cloud, Storage Guardian says that the new offering is identical to their flagship product line. That is to say, it intelligently compresses data, with a specialization in handling Microsoft application data.

This approach makes a lot of sense to MSPmentor, from an SMB perspective: it’s great to have some data in the cloud, but many administrators still want important stuff close to hand – integrating the two is a worthwhile approach. And while Storage Guardian is far from the first company to provide an alternative, it may be well past time for the tape drive to retire.

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