The Director series from Cachengo pairs a local storage appliance with cloud-based backup in a "unified storage solution" priced to appeal to small and midsize businesses.According to Cachengo founder Mike Young, the standard approaches to storage, backup, and disaster recovery present an unappealing set of choice for SMBs. Straight online backup of local storage works okay, says Young, until you accumulate a lot of data -- at typical upload speeds with most Internet connections, 50 GB, say, can take days to back up. But implementing a local fileserver plus backup storage and storage management features can cost upwards of $30,000 or more, which is a real hit to most small business' IT budgets.

"What we set out to do is to really pull together the notion of backup once and for all," says Young, "and create a data protection and archival solution truly priced for SMBs." The Director products are already available, but the company has been relying on word of mouth for marketing. It's now ready to roll the solution out to a wider customer base.

Cachengo's Director starts with a 1U local storage appliance that automatically backs up all servers and workstations, whether Windows, Mac, or Linux. The appliance supports server virtualization and provides deduplication across multiple virtualized servers. The appliance can be used by itself, or it can be integrated with Cachengo's Cloud Service for offsite storage. In that case, everything that's on the appliance gets backed up to the cloud, including virtualized versions of applications. That makes it a business continuity solution as well, says Young, because in case of disaster, the business can run their applications and access their files from the cloud, enabling them to get up and running quickly.

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The Director series of appliances comes in three sizes: the model 120 holds 2 TB of data and costs $4,000; the 160 holds 6 TB and costs $6,000; and the 1280 hold 8 TB and costs $12,000. The company's about to add a "mini" version, a desktop appliance that does everything the larger models do except virtualization; that one will cost $499. There are no additional costs for client licenses or for the deduplication and virtualization functions (on those models that support them). Adding in the Cloud Service costs an additional $0.20/GB/month, with no contract necessary.

Cachengo's also introducing Cachengo Hive, an innovative approach to sharing large files among employees, whether local or in remote offices. It's sort of a invitation-only peer-to-peer file sharing network, described by Young as a "Facebook for data." The file's originator sends an invitation to someone else in the company, who can (with the right permissions) invite others in turn. Each accepted invitation creates another node in the network, and all nodes supply data for download. The data is encrypted and the invitations are one-time only to help ensure security. Now in beta, Hive will be available for free to Cachengo customers at the end of March and will eventually be free for anyone to download.