EMC Cashes In Kashya

EMC has acquired data protection and replication software maker Kashya for $153 million in cash to improve its network virtualization and continuous data protection (CDP) products.

EMC is targeting a hot sector: According to IDC, storage replication, in which stored or archived data is copied in real time as it moves across a storage area network (SAN), grew 21.7 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter.

Robert Emsley, director of marketing for information management software at EMC, said Kashya’s disaster-recovery and replication technology will prop up Invista, which pulls storage from several devices into a single pool to draw from.

Invista copies and shuttles data across a network undisturbed and with zero latency.

The software allows IT administrators to create virtual volumes on the fly, lumping data from several storage devices into one pool from which users may draw.

“We made a decision to accelerate our ability to deliver operational and disaster recovery capabilities for that solution,” Emsley said. “The acquisition of Kashya helps us do that more expeditiously.”

Emsley also said EMC would make Kashya’s CDP technology the engine in future versions of EMC’s CDP software, RecoverPoint.

RecoverPoint triggers back-up and recovery tasks frequently throughout the day to ensure that data can be recovered at any point in time. If a disk does fail, the product recovers data up until the moment of the corruption or outage.

The driving engine of RecoverPoint is CDP software that EMC licenses from Mendocino. By buying Kashya, EMC will own all the pieces of RecoverPoint.

Finally, the executive said Kashya’s software will extend EMC’s software portfolio for remote replication across environments consisting of different operating systems, including Windows, Linux and different flavors of Unix.

EMC also plans to make Kashya’s Israel-based research and development operation the centerpiece of a new EMC software development center.

Kashya and its 75 employees, including CEO Michael Lewin, will become part of EMC’s software group. Lewin will report to Doc D’Ericco, vice president and general manager, EMC infrastructure software.

Kashya will retain its San Jose, Calif., headquarters.

For EMC, the deal is the latest example of how the company is steadily making its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy for shepherding files and other pertinent information from cradle to grave more refined.

The Hopkinton, Mass., company, whose software license and maintenance revenue jumped 11 percent to $925 million in the most recent quarter, believes making its software portfolio more granular will help it lure more customers and keep their current clients.

IDC said EMC led the storage software market in 2005 with a 29.7 percent revenue share, followed by Symantec with 20.3 percent and IBM with 10.5 percent.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com