Revivio Vies for Backup Bucks

Is it time to ditch snapshots? Backup and restore startup Revivio Inc. claims that its new appliance offers the equivalent of streaming video of all data changes, allowing companies to retrieve data as it existed at any point in time.

The Lexington, Mass.-based company has been talking about its so-called time-addressable storage technology since it stepped out of stealth in June. Next week, it's planning to announce that it has started shipping an early-adopter version of its TimeFrame Data Protection System (see Revivio Starts Talking Continuously). Revivio says the appliance, which consists of its home-grown software loaded onto a standard Intel-based box, will be generally available in the second quarter of next year.

TimeFrame, the startup claims, takes a radically different approach from traditional snapshot technology. While snapshots are taken of an entire data set at regular intervals, Revivio says that its technology continuously backs up only the block-level changes made to the data. The software also time-stamps each change to the data, enabling users to retrieve a document as it existed at any point in time. With snapshots, if a document is damaged or destroyed, users have to revert to the last snapshot taken of their data -- possibly hours or even days earlier. Revivio, on the other hand, claims that its customers can simply return to the version of the data as it existed the second before the damage occurred.

By doing a real-time capture of every write, technologies like Revivio’s have the ability to quickly recover data and get an operation up and running,” says Enterprise Storage Group Inc. analyst Steve Kenniston.

And since Revivio’s appliance only backs up changes made to the data, instead of regularly taking a snapshot of the entire environment, it can also dramatically reduce the amount of data on the company’s storage, according to Kirby Wadsworth, Revivio’s vice president of marketing. He points out that one of the companies the startup’s been talking with discovered that only 20 percent of its storage was primary data. The remaining 80 percent consisted of duplicates of that data.“We’re eliminating the use of live media for frozen storage,” he says. “It can save a lot of time and money.”

Of course, Revivio isn’t the only kid on the continuous data protection block: A number of other startups are working on, or have already started shipping, similar technologies, including Alacritus Software Inc., FilesX Inc., Radiant Data Corp., TimeSpring Software Corp., and Vyant Technologies Inc. The company also finds itself in the same playground as Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek)’s (NYSE: STK) EchoView (see StorageTek Hears an Echo and our report on Data Protection).

Wadsworth, however, says Revivio doesn’t have to worry about entering an increasingly crowded space. He insists the startup’s technology has, in many respects, taken a very unique approach to solving the backup problem.

While most of the other companies in this space use file-based technologies, he says, Revivio’s software protects at the block level. “Ours is not sensitive to what kind of file system you’re using,” he says. “It will support anything.”

In addition, he says, TimeFrame sits out-of-band and doesn’t require the user to install any agents on the host. Instead, the appliance, which looks like a RAID array to the application and like an application server to the array, receives a continuous mirrored write stream. Because it’s not in the data path, he says, it can, through a modular approach, scale up to hundreds of thousands of I/O operations per second (IOPS).As compelling as this may sound, Enterprise Storage Group's Kenniston warns that the startup may run into problems as it tries to get its appliance out the door. “The issue is that people are trying to consolidate things within their environment (including backup software),” he writes. “Deploying a new technology from a 'new' vendor isn't always the safest thing to do, unless, of course, you are solving some key issues. Then it may make sense.”

Revivio, which initially is only targeting financial institutions in New York and Boston, expects to sell four of the early-adopter versions of its TimeFrame appliance by the end of the year. “We’ll expand to other industries as well,” Wadsworth says. “But these guys have the problems in spades. They have petabytes of data, and this breakthrough technology can save them money and simplify their lives."

Pricing for the appliance starts at $50,000, but can scale up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the number of processing units, the performance, and the throughput, Wadsworth says.

— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch