Acquisition Brings ILM, CDP Together

Executives of Atempo said on Monday that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based developer of data protection and storage security software for information lifecycle management will acquire Storactive, a Marina del Rey, Calif.-based developer of continuous data protection software.

Information lifecycle management, or ILM, is a way of managing the long-term storage of data by migrating that data to lower cost, lower performance storage media as its business value decreases.

Data typically has greatest business value shortly after it is collected as it is used to make business decisions, or a company action is based on it, in which case it may be stored on high-performance hard drive-based storage subsystems. However, over time, as such data is accessed less frequently, it can be migrated to less-expensive hard drive-based arrays, and eventually to tape, decreasing the cost of storing it.

With continuous data protection, or CDP, changes to data are backed up immediately or at certain pre-defined intervals to allow users to be able to instantly recover a deleted, corrupted, or modified file. While some applications allow data changes to be captured on-the-fly, most back up the changes at set intervals.

Atempo's interest in Storactive stems from that company's two main CDP products, said Stephen Terlizzi, vice president of global marketing at Atempo.

The first, LiveServ for Exchange, provides CDP for Exchange e-mails, which is becoming increasingly important as businesses need to ensure they can archive and recover e-mails for compliance purposes, said Terlizzi.

The second, LiveBackup, protects mobile PC and handheld users by capturing changes to their data, he said. "The ability of Storactive products to capture every change in Exchange and on laptops is important to Atempo," he said.

Both LiveServ for Exchange and LiveBackup are true CDP applications, which means they backup changes as they occur, said Tony Bautista, president of Storactive, who after the acquisition will head CDP software business development at Atempo.

LiveServ captures all changes to Microsoft Exchange e-mails, and allows recovery of e-mails to any point in time and to a system failure, said Bautista. With LiveBackup, changes to data on a laptop PC can be sent to a backup file immediately if the user is online, or are stored in cache until a user logs on, he said.

Bringing CDP together with Atempo's Time Navigator ILM application is the next logical step for Atempo, Terlizzi said.

CDP will give customers real-time capture of data, which can then be encrypted via Time Navigator in order to secure that data and ensure it is compliant according to customer requirements, he said. Time Manager then moves the protected data across multiple tiers of storage, he said.

About 70 percent of Atempo's business is via indirect sales channels, with much of the direct business concentrated in France, Terlizzi said. The company sells through Microsoft-centric solution providers, OEM builders of desktop and mobile PCs, and service providers that include data backup as part of their services, he said.

Both privately held companies declined to discuss financial details of the acquisition.