NEWS

IBM Buys Israeli Continuous Data Protection Startup

Blocks & Files
April 10, 2008
By Chris Mellor

FilesX offers near instant restore

IBM is buying Israeli startup FilesX which offers continuous data protection (CD)P) and nearly instant restore for enterprises and their remote and branch offices.

Although terms were not disclosed it is reported to be paying $30 - 40 million for the privately-held firm which was founded in 2000 by Jacob Herbst, Irit Many-Meitav, and Assaf Sarfati. Its CEO is Jimmy Garcia-Meza who was very recently appointed, in August 2007. The company has raised $20 million from Benchmark Capital, Genesis Partners, and Index Ventures, and is based in Haifa, Israel, with an office in Newton, Massachusetts.

FilesX states its aim is to 'provide customers with the power to instantly recover any type and amount of data, anywhere in the organization, from any previous point-in-time, no matter what happens to cause a loss of data.' This has resulted in its line of Xpress Restore products based on CDP on-demand technology. This enables users to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO, RTO) on a per-application basis in Windows environments. It melds continuous, frequent and scheduled protection engines into one logical scheme.

FilesX is integrated with and fully application-aware of MS Exchange and SQL enabling seamless, continuous backup and instantaneous recovery of individual Exchange emails, contacts, attachments, SQL tables, individual files, volumes and servers using Bare Metal Recovery (BMR).

At the remote and branch office level FilesX is said to be very easy to use and almost self-managing. The firm has around 100 customers and has existing relationships with HP, IBM and Microsoft.

FilesX was included in Gartners' "Cool Vendors in Data Protection, 2008” report published in March this year.

IBM will integrate FilesX technology into its Tivoli Storage Manager line of data protection and information infrastructure products. IBM already has a small/medium enterprise CDP offering; Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, which FilesX should complement.

Across the board

IBM will now be able to offer CDP and concommitant faster, more granular recovery for SOHO, SME and enterprises, from laptops to desktop PCs to servers, and from remote and branch offices through to data centres.

Al Zollar, GM for Tivoli Software at IBM, said: “The FilesX acquisition would complement IBM’s vision of enterprise data protection by adding critical capabilities for remote offices, delivering continuous data protection for applications and servers, and supporting business user needs with nearly instantaneous recovery of data. It would also reinforce IBM’s mid-market strategy by adding a simple and easy to use full data protection solution – one that also is attractive to enterprise remote offices and departmental situations.”

Jimmy Garcia-Meza, FilesX CEO, said: “FilesX customers can benefit from the broad resources IBM has committed to growing the storage management part of its business, and will continue to receive support under their existing agreements."

This is the second Israeli startup IBM will have bought this year. In January it bought grid and clustered file storage vendor XIV for a reported $300 million. Its founder was Moshe Yannai, the father of EMC's Symmetrix high-end drive array product line. Yannai also founded de-duplication vendor Diligent which IBM is reportedly trying to buy as well. He has no official connection with FilesX.

Footnote

FilesX co-founder Jacob Herbst was once the firm's president and CEO. As such he was scheduled to fly on September 11, 2001 - yes, the 9/11 - from Boston to Los Angeles on American Airlines flight 11. There was a call for him to cancel a recuitment meeting with Mike Beaudet, who became FilesX' sales VP, in Los Angeles and so he cancelled his booking on the flight, that same flight which terrorists crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre killing everybody on board and destroying that tower.