Another Start-Up in Backup Appliance With Cloud Storage: Cachengo

Self-funded Cachengo, Inc. was launched in April 2009 and is headquartered in Berthoud, CO, near Loveland. Its name comes from ‘cache-n-go’.

 
Founder, president and CEO Mike Young is a NAS expert. He was previously CTO of the storage appliance business unit of Xyratex via the acquisition of NetHelix in 2005, and, before that, CTO of Snap Appliance, acquired by Adaptec in 2004.
    
Just before launching Cachengo, from 2007 until March 2009, he was at Suλego, Inc., as founder, president and CEO, involved in fast NAS appliances for SMBs, with HQ in SF, CA and an office in the same … Berthoud, CO.

Young was also co-founder, COO and CTO of one of the industry’s first Linux-based NAS company, NetAttach, back in the late 90’s before it was acquired by VA Linux Systems. Prior to NetAttach, he has served in several management positions for Adaptec, Mylex and Storage Dimensions.

In Cachengo, a small company with around 10 people, there are also David Farace, channel alchemist, with more than 22 years of sales and marketing experience with Syquest, Dot Hill, VA Linux and others, as well as Sal Sanfilippo, in charge of software and previously holding architecture positions with Zeeco, Magenic and Jangi.

The idea of the start-up is to combine off-site storage with a locally installed appliance for a low-cost backup and DR solution for SMBs.

Cloud storage is integrated into its 1U appliance with four SATA HDDs in RAID-5, the CD100 Director, to be used as a stand-alone file server (CIFS, NFS and iSCSI) and a backup device or to send the data to other CD100 or to the cloud for online archiving. It integrates de-dupe and supports replicating data to multiple locations.

The CD100 is available now and is priced at $6,000 for the 6TB version and the users are charged for consumed capacity, at $0.20/GB/month including bandwidth.

Several storage companies and start-ups offer now backup solutions with an in-house appliance and the possibility to send the same data on the cloud. SMBs do not need two backup copies of their files. Only one outside on the web is enough. But the problem here is that the Ethernet bandwidth is too slow for the complete backup needed the first time before using any kind if compression, CDP or de-dupe, and then to recover rapidly after a disaster.