History 2005: Yosemite Wants to Play With Big Kids

When it comes to backup software, the names Veritas, Legato/EMC and CA are all household words, while that of Yosemite Technologies is unknown except to a few specialists. And for a good reason: since the firm to date has sold its licenses (854,000 of them, if you don’t mind) primarily to OEMs.

HP is the leading account, and the largest, over the past 5 years, but there’s also Dell for the past 3, as well as Exabyte, Gateway, Iomega, Tandberg and Quantum/Certance.

“60% of OEM tape drives use our bundle,” said Yosemite SVP product management and marketing John Maxwell.

This success is due to the low price of the license, as well as to a version that is not “light,” as is so often the case, but thorough, even if it’s limited to a single server.

The privately-held company gives no revenue figures, but according to Maxwell, sales to OEMs represented 70% of 2004 sales, compared to 30% for the channel with 100,000 core software bundles sold.

He also points out that Yosemite, founded by CTO Rod Christensen, has been cash positive since its inception and has undergone 2 financial rounds, for $4.5 million in December 2002, then $10 million in June 2004.

To pursue a development plan that should lead to an IPO planned, according to Maxwell, for sometime in the next 24 months, Yosemite has 2 main goals: to inverse the OEM/channel ratio, and to enter the crowded market of enterprise backup.

Until now, its flagship product was TapeWare, a name that will soon disappear, to be replaced by Backup Basic for OEM and Backup Standard for SMBs.

The company launched, just this year, Backup Advanced, an entirely rewritten software, thus more effectively optimized than most of the competition, which are by and large old software versions that have been updated several times, with a few new applicative functions added on.

The most important goal is to compete with its main rival in the field, Veritas with its successful Backup Exec.

“We have three ways to  compete,”  Maxwell explains, “1) performance and scalability, 2) the possibility to run natively on Windows, Linux, NetWare and Unix and 3) the price, since we are 20% cheaper than Veritas.” 

Several technologies are worth a closer look in Backup Advanced: It has a modular 3-tier architecture with 1)a master server containing the catalog and capable of managing billions of files, 2) server clients and 3) a media server with the backup tape or optical drives and libraries.

A feature called self-tuning logic allows users to optimize automatically the backup and restore performance by seeking the ideal number of source and target streams, as well as target devices.

D2D2Ne (disk-to-disk-to-any) creates virtual libraries on disk, although in a proprietary format.

Bare metal is an option to recover a server from scratch or virus by rapidly reinstalling an image of the server that is known as to be sound.

Backup Advanced is already shipping at prices starting at $3,500 for backup master server with the exact pricing dependant on the number of servers, not of processors.

According to a Gartner study, it costs roughly $270,000 for 200 applications servers, 5 Unix backup servers and 2 libraries for a total capacity of 40TB. A backup software managing a configuration on this scale would come much closer to $700,000 from Veritas and $500,000 from Legato/EMC, according to the research firm’s calculations.

Soon, thanks to the newly written code, all Yosemite software from the low end to the high will be the same products for Basic, Standard, Desktop (forthcoming) and Advanced Backup, with different features enabled or upgraded with a simple change in the license key.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 209 on June 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.