Wednesday, 29 November 2006

Symantec Acquires Revivio

Symantec has acquired continuous data protection vendor Revivio for an estimated USD 20 million. The company bought Revivio's intellectual property and will discontinue sales and development of Revivio's Continuous Protection System appliance. Symantec, which got into the data protection market with its acquisition last year of Veritas, plans to add Revivio's technology to its NetBackup product and sell a stand-alone CDP product of its own.

The idea of continuous data protection or CDP is to provide more up-to-date backups than just nightly ideally, second-by-second backups. But rather than back up the entire system image every time, whenever a change is made to a file, just that change is captured and backed up as a snapshot. Previous versions of files are protected and available for recovery through point-in-time snapshots. In contrast, nightly backups can only be used to restore to the last time a full backup was made, the company said.

Symantec has extended job offers to Revivio co-founders Michael Rowan and Kevin Rodgers as well as 11 other engineers. Rodgers was Revivio's director of engineering. Fifty other employees including CEO Michael Leahy will be let go, thw company said.