Barracuda Networks has announced that its Intronis MSP arm has added a virtual appliance option. The Barracuda Backup – Intronis MSP Edition leverages Barracuda’s existing virtual technology to provide the virtual appliance.
“Barracuda has had a virtual appliance out for a while,” said Neal Bradbury, Senior Director of Channel Development at Intronis MSP Solutions by Barracuda. “As partners have been requesting it, we have been pulling the Barracuda technology over to the MSP side. This is an example of that.”
Bradbury acknowledged that the virtual appliance is very much a niche use case.
“It’s for MSPs who are fully virtualized,” he said. “There aren’t a lot but there are some, and they tend to be larger. It is much less common in SMBs, where they typically tend to have a physical box.”
“I don’t see the virtual appliance taking share from the physical appliance,” Bradbury added. “We see it adding to the use cases where we become a fit.”
Another such use case – which Bradbury thinks will be even smaller, but which will exist – is partners who want the virtual appliance build their own backup appliance.
“This will able partners who want to create their own backup server,” he said.
The virtual appliance is similar to the physical version of Barracuda Backup – Intronis MSP Edition, which was released this spring. The virtual appliance option includes the same feature set, including integrated backup, compression, deduplication capabilities, and cloud-based centralized management. The virtual appliance lets MSPs avoid physical hardware management costs, like rack space, maintenance, and eventual replacement. It also lets them reduce power and cooling costs.
“We have the same pricing as the hardware model, which is simply a monthly subscription per month, with no up-front costs,” Bradbury said. The cost also includes replication to a virtual receiver at a secondary site.
The virtual version of the Barracuda appliance is complementary with Intronis’ other data protection solutions including their flagship Intronis ECHOplatform, a software-only solution, and the Barracuda NextGen Firewall – Intronis MSP Edition turnkey solution.
The Barracuda Backup – Intronis MSP Edition is available now.
