Seeking to help businesses trim storage spending and shorten recovery times, Draper, Utah-based StorageCraft Technology Corp. has purchased the online backup assets of Gillware Data Recovery. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Headquartered in Madison, Wis., Gillware makes an analytics solution that channel pros can use to assess a client’s data and make informed decisions about what should or shouldn’t be backed up on a machine by machine basis. While saving complete system images might make sense with mission-critical servers, for example, protecting file data alone could be adequate for laptops.
The Gillware software can also identify data that should be archived or even deleted rather than backed up.
Businesses increasingly need capabilities like those as data volumes continue to swell, according to Scott Barnes, StorageCraft’s CTO.
“Even though the hard drive prices have continued to go down, the data growth has continued to go up, and now it’s getting quite expensive for them to keep everything,” he says, adding that unnecessarily large backups can slow recovery times as well.
For the moment, Gillware’s software and StorageCraft’s will continue to function as separate solutions. Eventually, however, StorageCraft plans to embed Gillware’s data analytics functionality directly in its portfolio of BDR offerings.
“We’re going to take the data analytics and apply it to our entire product line,” says Barnes, who declined to estimate when Gilllware-equipped StorageCraft solutions will begin reaching market.
StorageCraft and Gillware have an existing and, according to Barnes, successful alliance relationship. That shared history made Gillware an obvious choice when StorageCraft entered the market for a data analytics vendor.
“We knew them and they had a good reputation,” Barnes says. “It just made a lot of sense.”
Gillware has two business units, one focused on backup and another focused on data recovery. The acquisition announced today affects Gillware’s online backup business only. Barnes considers that group’s 15 employees a key part of the deal.
“This is both a technology and people acquisition,” he says.
Gillware’s data recovery product unit will remain an independent company that continues doing business under the Gillware brand.
Both StorageCraft and Gillware partners can access Gillware products immediately via the latter company’s partner portal. Gillware solutions will be available through StorageCraft’s partner portal as well starting in November.
StorageCraft has been actively expanding its product family all summer. Its first cloud-to-cloud backup solution debuted in July, and an innovative new version of its VirtualBoot technology that can boot backup images created with the company’s ShadowProtect SPX solution as virtual machines on a VMware hypervisor host without a conversion process or backup appliance followed in August.
