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Acer is the number four branded PC vendor globally. It's decided to enter the disk-based backup market with a bang, introducing a virtual tape library (VTL) using FalconStor's de-duping VTL software.

Acer will introduce its Acer Storage Repository (ASR) based on FalconStor's VirtualTape Library software, with data de-duplication, into the low-end or small and medium enterprise (SMS) market. The software will be integrated with Acer's Altos R7-series server line.

The company is looking at Australia and New Zealand, to begin with.

Bert Noah, Acer's enterprise systems group director for the Oceanic area, said: "We are going to start presenting the ASR at the Altos Cafe' kicking off on the 4th of November in 10 cities in ANZ. Our target market is small to medium enterprises, which includes universities, private schools, local councils, small government departments, and mid-tier corporations. These customers have a high level of scrutiny by law, for instance, schools and universities have to maintain archived records for 30 years and councils have to maintain records (on) near-line even longer.”

Noah flattered FalconStor about its offering, saying: “The FalconStor VirtualTape Library is the number one VTL in the world and is OEM’d or resold by most major storage vendors. After extensive evaluation and tests by our team, FalconStor had the best offering across all four key functional blocks - optimising backup, tape management, data de-duplication, and global de-dupe replication - for data protection."

"(The new systems) provide ... customers (with) a turnkey backup and recovery appliance that is capable of giving them 60-200 days backup retention on disk with the ability to grow that as their primary storage grows. It also offers the ability to have a disaster recovery (DR) site with one-to-one or many-to-one replication.”

"FalconStor´s proven data protection technology supports both 4Gbit/s FC and 1GbE iSCSI high speed interaction between the backup server and VTL helping backup administrators to overcome the challenges of shrinking backup windows and explosive data growth.”

The entry of Acer into the VTL market can't but help to send down prices and extend VTL use in the SME area of the market significantly - assuming it goes global with its offering.