HPE Acquires Data Protection Software Developer Trilead

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has acquired a small data protection vendor that in some ways competes with more well-known applications like Veeam.

Trilead, an Altendorf, Switzerland-based developer of low-cost data protection software for VMware vSphere and ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized environments, put a statement on its website home page that it was acquired by HPE.

Neither the timing of the acquisition nor the purchase price was addressed in the statement.

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The Trilead statement read: "We are thrilled to announce that Trilead is now a part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its family of global and industry leading Information Management & Governance solutions. It’s been an exciting adventure for all of us at Trilead, thanks to our dedicated community of partners and customers. There is a lot more to come and we look forward to continued enhancements under the Hewlett Packard Enterprise brand."

An HPE spokesperson, in response to a CRN request for more information, emailed a statement: "To further accelerate our focus on virtualization, we acquired Trilead, a provider of backup solutions targeted exclusively on virtualized environments. This acquisition is consistent with HPE’s broader strategy to invest in growth areas that are core to the business."

The Trilead software is available in three versions. The Free edition backs up virtual machines while they are running, and allows drag-and-drop copying of files between VMware, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD servers.

The Pro edition adds tape backup, incremental backups, offsite backup copies, file-level restore, cloud backups and replication. The Enterprise edition adds several advanced cloud backup and restore features, encryption, and support for certain other products including EMC XtremIO and VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN).

The Pro edition is priced at $790, while the Enterprise edition is priced at $1,460. The prices are based on one license per installation regardless of the number of virtual machines or processors used.

However, the company currently provides only email-based support.

Chris Case, president of Sequel Data Systems, an Austin, Texas-based solution provider and longtime HPE channel partner, told CRN that he has not heard of Trilead before, but its acquisition by HPE appears to be an SMB data protection play for the vendor.

"Not knowing how it scales, it might be an SMB play," Case said. "Trilead offers free support. HPE offers nothing for free."

Case said Trilead appears to have many of the capabilities of Veeam, the Baar, Switzerland-based developer of one of the leading data protection suites for virtualized environments.

"Trilead has Hyper-V and VMware capabilities, and offers things like replication and scheduling," he said. "But it licenses on a per-installation basis. One license for an entire environment. With Veeam, in a 50-processor environment, say, 25 servers each with two processors, you need 50 licenses."

Case said Trilead does not seem to compete with HPE Data Protector, the enterprise-class data protection application owned by HPE.

Trilead is the second investment HPE has made in the storage software industry. HPE on Jan. 12 said it has acquired an equity stake in Scality, a developer of object storage software.

HPE appears to have partnered with Trilead in the past. The company, back when it was known as Hewlett-Packard, included Trilead as part of a software bundle in its EVA 6000 array.