Iomega offers several devices for small and medium size businesses that allow an organization to fulfill file storage requirements without breaking the budget on a larger, more complex appliance.  These storage appliances are also very useful when file storage is required at a remote office or branch.  At those locations a larger storage device may be too costly, and underutilized.  While Iomega's StorCenter devices may meet NAS (Network Attached Storage) requirements, they fall short if asked to perform disaster recovery operations which are essential for a company of any size.  Recently, Iomega began offering their more premier appliances with an installed EMC Avamar client.  This is certainly a step in the right direction, but some businesses may not be able to afford the cost associated with these devices, or an EMC Avamar infrastructure.

Currently, lower-end Iomega StorCenter appliances come with two default file copy options.  One option is using the Linux rsync protocol.  This works well when backing up to another Iomega device, but is incapitable with other EMC storage devices which makes this useless for a company looking to use an Iomega StorCenter appliance in a remote office, and back the files up to a larger storage appliance in a central datacenter such as an EMC VNX.  Iomega's answer to this limitation is the Windows file "Copy Job".  The process of transferring files via this standard copy job involves a destination and target "pre-scan" that detects new files, then transfers these files over the network to the remote CIFS share which could be a Windows file server or a larger storage appiance with a configured file share.  The Windows copy job will work good enough if the two devices are both on the LAN, but transfering data over the WAN with this function is very inefficent, and impractical.

There are multiple ways to workaround this lack of functionality, but the best and most affordable, is to introduce a Windows machine and use Robocopy.  Robocopy, or Robust File Copy, is a command-line initiated replication command that is standard in installations of Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Server 2008.  The trick to using Robocopy for remote replication is configuring your network to allow the Windows machine to communicate with both the Iomega device and the target storage appliance.  The next step is to map a drive on the Windows proxy for both the source (the Iomega device), and the destination or target (the file server or other NAS device).  Then, use the robocopy command to transfer files between the two devices.   Also, a simple batch file can be written and a scheduled task can be created on the Windows computer to launch the batch file.

Specific Robocopy commands can be found in this Microsoft TechNet article: <a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733145(WS.10).aspx">http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733145(WS.10).aspx</a>