Exabuilder, New Name in Archiving

At the head of start-up Exabuilder is Dominique Vinay, 60, an entrepreneur who will never stop to have ideas and found companies. After working at Sun and Convex, he was at the foundation of Quadratec that became Atempo and then founder and CEO of Active Circle. His new third venture is aimed at an archiving solution.

The 3-people’s company inludes also Olivier Multon, 50, who was in HPC at Convex (acquired by HP in 1995), Digital Equipment, SGI and then at IBM for four years.

SAS Exabuilder, based in Clamart and soon moving to Velizy, France, is self-funded and starts with a capital of €54,000. The company intends to grow slowly with the goal to get a dozen of end users for the first year with a product in the range of €12,000 for a 50TB appliance with the software.

What’s the idea? For Vinay, it is an archiving software module, also named Exabuilder, that can be adapted "in two weeks" to existing business-specific software applications by the start-up or ISVs.

Data are recorded on WORM media (HDDs, soon in MAID mode and LTO tapes) with an HSM process to transfer them with metadata from one to another media depending on their use. It includes secure access to data and interactive search engine.

The software has been written in Java and C++ on an OSGI Eclipse platform using open source software like OpenSSL, Bouncy Castle and Lucene, according to the company.

First version of Exabuilder will be available next July.

Comments

The archiving market is promising but there are already a lot of actors in this field using different approaches with software only or dedicated appliances. Just also in France, there are Active Circle and Atempo. In the world, we got C2C, Caringo, CommVault, DAX Archiving Solutions, Digitiliti, El Fresko Technologies, Dell, EMC, Enkive, Grau, HDS, HP, IBM, Insite, Iron Mountain, Jatheon, Ontrack, Permabit, Proofpoint, ProStor, Sun, Sunbelt, Symantec, Unitrends, Tarmin, ZL Technologies, etc., and more of them in archiving for specific needs (email, healthcare, law, video, etc.) and some of them also offering archiving in the cloud.

One more difficulty for a small and young company is to convince the customers of its long term lifetime for a proprietary software centered on long term archiving. That's why the future of Exabuilder is probably more in being bought by an established firm needing to get or enhance an archiving offering.