The core System Backup Administrator software was written for IBM Corp’s AIX Unix variant a number of years ago and was recently ported to the open source Linux operating system.
These AIX and Linux platforms run SBA–which can backup and restore files for the purposes of archiving, or go into disaster recovery mode and restore a working AIX or Linux operating system image on a remote machine – even if the underlying hardware (such as disks and controllers) is different on the new machine from the old machine for that operating system image.
With SBA 5.2, Storix is allowing a Linux-based SBA server to backup and restore data that is stored on Windows or Mac OS X clients or servers; it does not provide disaster recovery (by which Storix means restoring working operating systems) to these platforms. This backup/restore functionality for Windows and OS X is not available with AIX-based servers at this time.
In addition to the new platform support, SBA 5.2 also includes optional 128-bit, 192-bit, and 256-bit data encryption on backed-up files, which would come in pretty handy these days at the big banks that keep losing credit card data.
A base, two-node network configuration of SBA 5.2 costs $1,200 on Linux/X86 platforms, $2,100 on Linux/Power platforms, and $2,400 on AIX/Power platforms. The Windows and OS X backup/restore feature costs $79 per backed up device (be it a desktop or server). The data encryption feature costs $269.
