IRVINE, Calif., March 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Western Digital® (NYSE: WDC), the world's leader in digital storage solutions, has announced that it is offering to customers of its WD Sentinel™ DX4000 storage server an offsite data storage service that improves data protection for the small business owners who rely on WD Sentinel to protect their precious business information. WD partnered with KeepVault®, which was recently added to the AuthenTec® line of services, to serve WD's Sentinel small office storage server customers.

WD Sentinel storage servers act as an on-site cloud storage solution for small to medium-sized businesses (SMB). The addition of KeepVault provides an integrated offsite backup solution for SMBs' most important information, providing secure offsite disaster protection. The service integrates seamlessly into the administration dashboard and the user can choose to compress and or encrypt data while backing it up to the cloud, allowing for improved data transfers with increased security. Data from WD Sentinel can be backed-up to KeepVault either real time or as per a user-defined backup schedule and the administrator can choose to throttle the bandwidth to manage network performance, thus providing the SMB a hands-free, peace-of-mind off-site data protection system.

"In the event of a natural or man-made disaster, an SMB could lose everything if its place of business were compromised," said Thomas Gallivan, vice president of marketing for WD's SMB solutions group. "By adding KeepVault to the WD Sentinel product, we have provided our customers with an additional tool for protecting their businesses with a system that provides seamless backup and full data restoration, ensuring that an SMB has the insurance to get their business up and running in the event of a crisis."

KeepVault's user interface makes it easy for a SMB to track online backup history. It also provides recovery options in the user interface, allowing users one-click recovery, selective recovery, and selected download options to recover the data on the same or a completely new WD Sentinel storage server. KeepVault, a subscription service, will come pre-installed but not pre-activated on all WD Sentinel products, so customers may choose whether or not to use KeepVault as their off-site backup solution for a WD Sentinel storage server. WD and AuthenTec have established special offerings for WD Sentinel customers to "Connect and Protect" their SMB information.

Customers can sign up for a service plan directly from within the KeepVault user interface pre-installed in the WD Sentinel administration dashboard or by visiting KeepVault's partner page for WD at http://wdc.keepvault.com. More information on WD Sentinel small storage servers can be found at http://www.wdc.com/wdsentinel.