data protection

Overland bundles up InMage in Business Continuity Appliance

Because the Snap Server acquisition prompted questions about its ability to protect application data, Overland Storage Inc. today introduced a new Business Continuity Appliance for server and application failover based in part on a partnership with InMage Systems Inc.

Overland acquired the Snap Server product line from Adaptec a year ago, and its move into the internal storage market with the NAS boxes’ direct-attached disks prompted customers to ask more frequently about server, operating system and application availability offerings from Overland.

“We saw deals going away from us,” Overland senior product director Kevin Wise said candidly. “BCA strengthens that part of our data protection story.”

The BCA is available in two form factors: the BCA100 and the BCA200. The BCA100 is a 1U pizza box and the BCA200 is a 2U chassis. The BCA100 contains enough software licenses to support up to five application servers, the BCA200 comes with support for up to 10 and can expand beyond that with additional license keys.

“The REO BCA is designed and priced for SMBs—starting at less than $24,000,” noted Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst Lauren Whitehouse in an email to Storage Soup. “The all-in-one appliance enables application-aware failover/failback to deliver near-zero recovery objectives … now SMBs have a cost-efficient alternative to tape-based backup for local operational recovery and remote disaster recovery.”

The boxes can protect application data, but they don’t perform bare-metal restores. That means customers need operating system licenses available at a secondary DR location to completely rebuild a server. Customers can also purchase application agents to support Microsoft Exchange, SQL and Windows file systems. Plans call for adding support for Oracle and Microsoft SharePoint down the road.

Wise was cagey when I asked for a complete list of the partners Overland is working with for this product, saying multiple pieces of software had been integrated into the box. Vice president of product marketing Ravi Pendekanti confirmed InMage software is at least one of the pieces of the software puzzle, contributing continuous data protection (CDP) with replication. Overland reps would not name any other partners.

“The real value of this product is in the integration and support,” Wise said.

Sure, but customers want to know what’s being integrated, I pressed. No dice. Long story short - if you’re evaluating this product, make sure to ask for all the details on what’s behind the curtain.

Bocada resurfaces, plans backup reporting updates

I’m still digesting all the vendor meetings I had last week at the BD Event. One of the company executives I met with last week was Nancy Hurley, CEO of Bocada Inc. for a little over a year now.

Hurley told me she spent most of her time since becoming CEO last May trying to get the Bocada’s house in order. “We went through our recession already,” she said, adding the vendor rebounded to reach profitability by the end of last year. Hurley said that was mostly the result of improving internal business processes.

Having completed its internal makeover, Hurley said Bocada will update its Bocada Enterprise software June 30 and again later this year. She hopes the two-phase approach to breaking up the monolithic software into a modular front end will help attract more channel sales and improve workflow within the product.

Bocada Enterprise 5.4 will add “policy mining,” which will allow the software to understand each policy for every backup server client, when that policy changed, and how that has impacted backup job failures or error reports. This version will also begin the modularization process by more clearly delineating the workflow between each of the services it provides, from healthcheck to problem management to change management. “Today we leave the customer to navigate the workflow themselves,” Hurley said. “They have to know where they have to go next. Our next update will move them through to the next step.”

The second update planned for later this year will separate the front-end into sections that can be sold and deployed separately, though the back-end will remain the same. The customers Bocada has in mind for this are service providers who may need to offer a combination of services to customers and issue service level agreements (SLAs) for each service. Advanced modules are also planned for generating SLAs and thresholding, i.e., “If this keeps happening, 30 days from now you might not meet your SLA,” explained Hurley.

Other products that began as backup reporting tools, such as Aptare’s StorageConsole, have broadened their capabilities to include storage resource management (SRM). But Hurley said Bocada plans to stick to its knitting in the data protection space. “To me, even addressing everything in data protection is hard — we don’t want to dilute that value by also having to go and look at how much capacity you have on Clariion,” she said.

Bocada may have picked a good time to re-enter the reporting software market; TheInfoPro’s Wave 12 Storage Study showed that capacity planning and reporting shot to #1 on the list of priorities for storage professionals during the economic downturn.

BakBone broadens its message

Ten days after picking up Exchange CDP vendor Asempra, BakBone Software Thursday grabbed an entire message management division.

BakBone acquired ColdSpark for $15.9 million in cash and stock, and ColdSpark’s products will make up BakBone’s new division. ColdSpark founder and CTO Scott Brown becomes general manager of the message management group.
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With Asempra, ColdSpark and BakBone’s NetVault platform, BakBone can protect data in a structured repository or file system or in motion as it moves across messaging systems. This also brings it beyond pure backup, where it probably can be no more than a niche player in a market where it competes with Symantec, EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, CA, and CommVault. Now BakBone is a player in email management as well. That’s another crowded market, but there is still opportunity for a small player.

BakBone’s shopping spree comes within months of its taking a big step to remove a cloud that has hovered over the company for years. BakBone was knocked off the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2004 after accounting irregularities forced it to restate earnings for 2003 and 2004. It has been working on getting its books in compliance and current since then, and finally did that in February by filing annual reports for 2007, 2008 and the first three quarters of its 2009 fiscal year. BakBone is working on getting re-listed now that is financials are caught up.

My guess is BakBone will continue to move aggressively in the coming months, whether it’s making more acquisitions or pushing out its message about messaging.

CommVault sales slip, looks to cloud for sunnier days

Even with the sales expectation bar lowered due to the economy, CommVault still failed to clear it by a long way last quarter. Now CommVault CEO Bob Hammer is looking for data deduplication and management of storage clouds to pull his company out of its slump.

CommVault’s revenue of $56.1 million last quarter was down 1% from last year and down 7% from the disappointing previous quarter, and well below its previous forecast of $63 million to $67 million. CommVault’s net income of $200,000 for the quarter was down from $6.2 million in the same quarter last year.

Hammer blamed the poor results mainly on the economy, compounded by pricing discounts from his larger competitors Symantec and – to a lesser extent — EMC with its Avamar products.

“The numbers weren’t good,” Hammer told StorageSoup. “We got hit pretty hard clearly, but most of it was the economy. We found customers freezing budgets, reducing budgets, reducing capex. We also saw more competitive pricing pressures, but the big issue was the market locked up.”

The good news, Hammer says, is CommVault has already seen a thaw in spending budgets and strong interest in sales of Simpana 8 driven by deduplication. CommVault released Simpana 8 in late January, and its large OEM partners Dell and Hitachi Data Systems will begin selling it this quarter.

CommVault’s internal goals call for revenues to increase in double-digit percentages this quarter, but the company lacked the confidence to give any forecast. Hammer did say many customers’ budget restrictions have lifted.

“It’s too early to call this a big thaw, but it looks like the fundamentals are in place,” Hammer said. “The whole psychology is lot more positive. Budgets are there and customers are initiating projects. There’s still budget scrutiny, but it seems to be a lot easier to work with customers to close the deal.”

Hammer said CommVault shuffled its workforce to try to increase revenue by placing more people in sales and reducing other areas. The vendor will also offer “more flexible” pricing and payment models to counter what Hammer calls Symantec’s “kill CommVault in the cradle” discount programs. CommVault’s average selling price dropped to around $200,000 last quarter from $250,000 the previous quarter.

Hammer said Simpana 8 gained several hundred customers in the quarter, including more than 100 for its block-level dedupe. He says the software dedupe product had a high win rate against dedupe appliances from Data Domain, Quantum and others.

“The release was extremely successful, which sounds interesting given that we missed our number,” Hammer said.

CommVault is already looking to Simpana 9, which will likely be in beta late this year and in general release in mid-2010. The concentration will be on helping service providers managing storage in the cloud. Hammer says managed service providers are already a fast-growing segment of CommVault’s customer base.

“Storage clouds represent a natural target for Simpana,” he said. “There is no universal automated platform to manager internal and external clouds in a large global enterprise. We’ve been working on several innovative concepts to enable Simpana to be the first fully automated platform to deal with key aspects of cloud computing.”