Revivio Building Channel For Continuous Data Protection Device

The three-and-a-half-year-old Lexington, Mass.-based company is one of a handful of startups that, along with a couple of mainstream storage vendors, are tackling the continuous data protection space. With continuous data protection, changes to data are backed up immediately to allow users to go back to any point in time to recover a deleted, corrupted or modified file.

Revivio's Continuous Protection System appliance appears to the host as a mirrored storage device. It time-stamps each block of data as it is written to the mirror and can be used to restore a file at any point in time.

Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation, a San Diego-based solution provider, said his company is now testing a Revivio appliance in its lab.

Continuous data protection is becoming a hot topic among Nth's customers, said Baldwin. "With [traditional] data snapshots, you get point-in-time protection," he said. "But every array vendor implements it differently. Some have a limit of seven snapshots, some a couple hundred, some several thousands. Revivio is effectively doing a snapshot every second. You can roll back to a file to a certain time, and if it's not what you want, you can roll back a few more seconds."

Revivio has been focusing on direct sales while waiting to understand how to sell the product before building a channel, said Kirby Wadsworth, senior vice president of marketing and business development at the vendor.

However, it only has just enough direct-sales people to get started with a few initial customers, said Wadsworth. "We just wanted to get enough hungry dogs who want to eat our dog food," he said.

To build the channel, Revivio recently brought in Steve Santos as vice president of sales from Dot Hill, where he helped transition that company from a direct to an indirect model, said Wadsworth.

Revivio has already signed four solution providers in the United States and is looking for more partners committed to storage and data protection, Santos said. They should also have a strong services background and experience selling emerging technologies, he said.

The Revivio value proposition is that it works with any vendor's storage products, Santos said. "For someone selling backup, tape or data replication products, continuous data protection is a natural extension," he said. "Customers don't need to invest in learning new technology. It's more like, 'Do you want fries with that?' "

Revivio's direct-sales reps will focus on driving channel opportunities and will bring a partner on all sales calls, Santos said. Those partners will have access to a deal-registration program and can offer different levels of service and support, he said.