CloudBerry Lab adds support for AWS Snowball to on-board data

CloudBerry Backup Server Edition lets customers use AWS Snowball appliance for initial backup

Cloud backup firm CloudBerry Lab has added support for Amazon's AWS Snowball in its latest update, with the intention of making it easier for customers to on-board the initial backup data when using the Amazon S3 storage service as a backup target.

CloudBerry Backup Server Edition version 4.8 is primarily aimed at SMB customers, and the new support allows customers using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backups to configure a backup plan that will upload the first batch of data to an AWS Snowball appliance.

AWS Snowball was unveiled last year as a way to transfer large data sets to the company's cloud platform, when uploading via a WAN connection would be impractical or too costly. It comprises an appliance that connects to the customer's network, and can be loaded with up to 50TB of data before being returned to Amazon.

Once the device is returned to AWS and data is uploaded, users will see the data online and be able to perform future backups over the network by uploading only increments of new and changed blocks.

Transferring data this way is simple, fast and secure, and can be as little as one-fifth of the cost of using a high-speed internet connection, according to CloudBerry.

CloudBerry chief technology officer Alexey Serkov said that affordable bandwidth is making cloud-based backup an increasingly attractive option for many businesses, but the size of the initial upload can be an issue.

"Depending on the total capacity of data, the first full backup can be time consuming and cause problems for production systems. By integrating CloudBerry Backup with AWS Snowball, we are validating our commitment to make backup as simple, resource- and time-efficient as possible for our customers," he said.

As well as Amazon S3, customers can choose from more than 20 cloud-based storage services as the target for backups, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, HP Cloud, Rackspace and Softlayer.

CloudBerry Backup Server Edition costs $119.99 (£93.32) to purchase, which includes one year of free maintenance and upgrades. After the first year, customers will be charged 20 per cent of the initial licence cost for each additional year of maintenance and upgrades.

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