Cash-bloated startup takes on data protection giants

Ash Ashutosh's Actifio startup has been flooded with cash by VCs - $59.5m since its founding in 2008 - to create a virtualised data protection and availability device. Is it on fire? Actifio's PAS (Protection and Availability System) is a server running a distributed object filesystem, described as a Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP …

[Antoine Dubuc]

What?

Something funny happens when you deeply understand something: you can explain it to a six year old.

I did not understand what this company does or how.

[Anonymous Coward]

All eggs in one basket

...what could go wrong?

; )

[steeplejack]

I would speculate

that the answer might be "filesystem corruption".

[Anonymous Coward]

The world is not all virtual despite what vendors may claim - what about the physical estate? Use one tool for physical and a different one for virtual? Might be OK for backup but backup is EASY - recovery is the hard part!

What about when I come to do a DR restore? 2 tools, 2 different processes and maybe even 2 different teams of people means, at best, twice the risk.

[BackUpGuy]

Check it out in more detail

AC -

Actifio can protect both physical and virtual environments with a single solution. Additionally, our UI makes it easy to not only set up your protection policies but also to recover the information via restores, mounts or clones depending on the need. Finally, in regards to the DR comment, restores can be done remotely and across the wire if needed. Please feel free to contact us if you'd like to go into these in any more detail!

Thanks!

-Kevin

[Anonymous Coward]

$60M in venture capital in 3 years is hardly a flood....

With the $33M they just got they are probably going to bulk up to a 150 or 200 employees in the next year--not exactly a huge startup....

[De Facto]

Cloud backup not for everyone

It is all about trust and security. Enterprise customers with a lot to loose probably would prefer not to share their data on the cloud. Big enterprises are touting cloud to small and mid-size businesses, but always are creating and running their own cloud. In fact, some of them are looking not for cloud customers, but for customers of their cloud customers. So better beware merchants. Safety of information, including backup of your data, can only be guaranteed by fully owning of all backups of that data and controlling physical access to backup media. Don't be fooled by illusions that somebody will do better than you. Most of the time probably outsourced backup will not harm the business. In emergency nobody knows what business priorities your backup provider will honor first.