Developed by Equus MSP Solutions, Symform, and StorageCraft, the solution offers unlimited off-site cloud storage at a flat rate included with purchase.
Equus MSP Solutions of Minnetonka, Minn., which provides hardware as a service (HaaS) to the channel, has partnered with Seattle-based Symform and StorageCraft, of Draper, Utah, to offer the Cloud Box, MSP hardware with image-based backup 
software and unlimited off-site cloud storage at a flat rate included with the purchase.† The new appliance, part of Equus MSP Solution’s HaaS line, is offered to partners for a flat fee of $199 a month, which includes all licensing and unlimited offsite cloud storage up to the maximum capacity of the internal storage of the appliance.
“In the Cloud Box, we’ve created an all-in-one storage, backup, and disaster recovery solution that allows for an affordable, true, flat-rate offering,” says Frank Gurnee, Equus MSP Solutions vice president of channel sales. “We’re offering a simple, accessible, real-world answer to the frustrations and pricing objections that have plagued the typical backup storage models.”
The Cloud Box is an Equus BDR UCA-1 with one terabyte capacity built around an Intel server hardware platform. It includes†Windows Server 2008R2 and StorageCraft’s† ShadowProtect DBR software,†which delivers virtualization for server redundancy†and† backup scheduling through a simple interface. †The Cloud Box then combines Symform’s decentralized cloud storage with the local backup capability provided by ShadowProtect, ensuring that data stored on the device is doubly protected.
The Symform Storage Cloud is the industry’s first decentralized cloud storage solution. Users contribute inexpensive local storage equal to the amount of data they want to redundantly store in the cloud. Symform then uses RAID-96 to geographically distribute, encrypt, and shred the data.
