EMC Acquires Disaster Protection Vendor

EMC has acquired Kashya, a highly regarded start-up vendor that offers data-protection solutions with key technology lacking in the storage giant's own portfolio.

Kashya is a supplier of appliances that provide disaster recovery and data replication over heterogeneous networks using continuous data protection (CDP) capability. EMC said Tuesday that it has acquired the company for $153 million, which will immediately be integrated into the company's software group headed by Dave DeWalt.

CDP, the function of backing up data in real time with the ability to have any number of recovery points, is a hot topic among storage vendors and is often described as the latest wave in disaster recovery and business continuity. Kashya, based in San Jose, Calif., is among a number of well-regarded start-ups with strong CDP functionality.

EMC plans to integrate Kashya's technology into its InVista virtualization technology.

"InVista is at the beginning of its life, and EMC has been asking itself what direction InVista would take," says Gartner analyst Robert Passmore. 'By acquiring Kashya, they have settled that question."

Rather than performing just data migration, InVista via Kaysha's technology will be able to offer multivendor remote replication and CDP, Passmore adds. A number of vendors were eyeing Kashya, he says.

Rob Emsley, senior director of EMC's software product marketing, pointed to three reasons it decided to acquire Kashya: to accelerate the delivery of network-based continuous replication and CDP to InVista; for the addition of heterogenous remote replication over Windows, Linux and Unix systems; and to incorporate CDP technology into its RecoveryPoint software, launched late last year. EMC had licensed the CDP technology for RecoveryPoint from Mendocino.

"Now we own this piece of technology," Emsley said.

Kashya, which has 75 customers, had recently launched a channel program, which Emsley said will be incorporated into EMC's Velocity program. It was not clear how many channel partners Kashya had, but the program just launched in March. Still, Emsley said that will provide the impetus to bring RecoveryPoint to the channel, which he said is now offered only direct.

It was also not clear what will become of Kashya's appliances, though Emsley said EMC will continue to offer both software only and solutions bundled with hardware.

In addition, Kashya has an Israeli-based R&D center, which will form the core of EMC's new Israel Software Development Center.

Kashya recently rolled out a new version of its KBX5000 Data Protection Platform. Release R2.3 added application-aware integration with Microsoft- and Oracle-based applications, providing near real-time recovery of data at remote sites that had more than 2 Gbps connectivity.