Breaking the addiction to large storage vendors

Covering storage sometimes reminds me of browsing the Internet: Occasionally you may reach an apparent dead-end, but you are always far from having walked into every corner.

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One of the reasons for this virtually infinite dimension of storage is obviously the number and variety of vendors. It's got to be in the hundreds, but I haven't seen an accurate census of storage vendors yet. And the large majority of those vendors are often small companies that don't have the large coffers and the booming marketing voice of the few big guys.

The result is that customers hear mostly about what the few large vendors have to offer, which is a pity because often, the most interesting new technologies and the most innovative solutions are proposed by the small players in this industry. 

In that vein, I'm taking this opportunity to point the Storage Insider spotlight on two well-established vendors of data protection solution for SMBs: Revinetix and Yosemite.

I'll start with Yosemite Technologies, a company that you probably already know for its multiplatform backup application. Yosemite is not saying how much it paid for it, but the recent acquisition of FileKeeper CDP (continuous data protection) adds a very complementary product to its portfolio.

Describing how FileKeeper CDP works is easy: You install a local agent on each protected machine. The agent intercepts and locally replicates new files and changes to existing files. When the laptop is connected to a network, those changes will automatically flow to a dedicated shared directory.

An administrator can set up policies to define how to use the system, but within those rules, users can retrieve a previous version of a file without any outside assistance from the familiar context menu of Windows Explorer.

FileKeeper CDP currently supports only Windows laptops and desktops, and its unclear at the moment if it will expand in the future to other platforms or to a server environment. For now, FileKeeper CDP works independently from Yosemite backup application. You can try it out free for 30 days, too.

For many small businesses, protecting their data with vulnerable combinations such as a backup application plus a tape library just doesn't cut it. What if you need frequent fast restores? How can you manage seamless replicas to multiple sites? How can you implement ironclad data protection without a small army of technicians?

Because of that, some SMBs found that Revinetix backup appliances were easier to implement and less expensive than other data protection alternatives. Revinetix offers desktop and rack-mountable appliances with various capacities, but they all have a common OS, the RevOS, and the ability to create a second copy of backup data on a removable drive for archiving.