The X Series Appliances Secured by Sophos covers customer needs up to the 3PB range, significantly higher than the successful 9000 series introduced a year ago, which was the first joint collaborative product of Arcserve and Sophos.
In September 2019, data protection vendor Arcserve and cybersecurity vendor Sophos announced a new OEM alliance and a new product, the Arcserve 9000 series, which provided integrated backup and security protection focused specifically on the ransomware problem. Now the companies have extended their relationship, with the new X Series Appliances Secured by Sophos. These are aimed at customers with larger data needs than the 9000 series, which extend into the multi-petabyte range.
“The X Series is a big brother to the 9000, and is intended for customers who have more data, typically from 352 GB to over a PB,” said Sam Roguine, backup, DR and ransomware prevention evangelist at Arcserve. “It is intended to cover the upper midmarket to the lower end of the enterprise.” The X Series has over 3 PB of effective capacity, with the possibility of linear expansion to increase capacity as needed.
Roguine said that the X Series name isn’t an explicit reference to the Sophos Intercept X technology that is used in the appliance – sort of.
“It is not a direct reference,” he said. “It is an Arcserve product, but the linkage is partially intentional.”
ArcServe’s announcement of the product touts its suitability for Big Data needs, but that’s somewhat misleading. Big Data has increasingly become identified with a specific use case around analytics, particularly with the High Performance Computing Market. Roguine stressed that’s not the market for the X series.
“We are absolutely focused on the broader market, and not a more niche use case, which is something we rarely focus on,” he said. “Big data here really just means a large amount of data. Petabyte-scale is really the key idea.”
Roguine said that customer acceptance of the initial 9000 series from the Sophos collaboration has been strong.
“The market has responded brilliantly,” he exulted. “We have won a lot of awards for this product, and that includes cybersecurity contests where we were the only data protection vendor who participated. It has been an extremely successful rollout. Sophos is really happy with it, and it solved customer problems with ransomware.”
The major difference between the 9000 and the X Series is scalability.
“Our 9000 will continue to be available, but it is designed for a pure midmarket play, with 250-2500 employees being the sweet spot,” Roguine said. “This is for companies with larger needs, and a sweet spot of 2500-10,000 employees.”
Apart from the scalability, there are some other upgrades from the 9000, including more DR capability, more CPUs [56 cores], larger amounts of RAM [1TB, expandable to 2TB] and linear scalability.
“We have five models in the X Series and each except the largest can be expanded to the next largest model,” Roguine indicated. “The 9000 can be expanded, but only once.” The X Series expansion is facilitated by just adding to the population in the same box, which Roguine noted also means no additional issues around thinks like cables, power or cooling.
Roguine said that Arcserve has already spoken with many channel partners about the new appliance.
“The overall consensus is that they are very excited,” he stated. “It means larger deals and larger margins, and we already have one of the best margins in the industry. It’s also significant in the way it solves problems for customers. If they have a PB of data, they now have a solution that won’t break the bank. And we deliver a total solution with the help of our friends at Sophos.”
Roguine also noted that unlike some of their competitors, Arcserve tries to keep margins up by not overdistributing their product.
“We have 7500 partners worldwide, and they are carefully selected,” he said. “You won’t hit six of them if you open a window to throw something out.”
