Onsite data protection firm for small businesses — Drobo — and small business and consumer cloud-based backup service provider — Carbonite — Wednesday announced a partnership that will let small business customers take advantage of the combined features of the two solutions at a discount.
Drobo provides a “small box” appliance that lets small businesses mix and match SATA hard-disk drives (HDD) to provide data protection through a small onsite, simple to manage and administer, local storage appliance.
Carbonite, meanwhile, offers a pair of cloud backup services for small businesses that provide online backup via a Web connection.
Through the partnership, small business customers can have access to both onsite data protection via Drobo as well as online backup services remotely via Carbonite.
“Our customers value easy and affordable data protection,” Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Drobo, said in a statement. “Carbonite adds the easiest and most affordable cloud backup to an overall data protection strategy for small businesses,” he added.
“Our market research has indicated that small business customers would augment their existing physical data protection strategy with an automatic, cloud-based solution if it were affordable, so we built Carbonite Business specifically to address those needs,” David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, said in a statement.
Carbonite, most recognizable as a leader in consumer online backup services and for TV ads where a riding mower runs over a user’s laptop, introduced a pair of services for small businesses in mid-June.
Carbonite Business, which costs $229 per year, will back up 250 GB of data on an unlimited number of PCs, while Carbonite Business Premier costs $599 per year and will back up an unlimited number of PCs and servers up to 500 GB of data.
Under the partnership offer, Drobo customers can sign up for a 14-month subscription for either of the new Carbonite small business services for the price of a 12-month subscription.