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Revivio to reveal storage product
By Elizabeth Dinan
June 16, 2003 - After more than a year of covert engineering and development, Lexington's Revivio is announcing a unique time addressable storage product. Sort of.
Revivio will officially preview the system June 17 at New York's Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference, but until then is teasing only some of what the company calls its "breakthrough" technology. The company hasn't shown the product to analysts, with the exception of Gartner, which is under a confidentiality agreement.
It did however retain Jon William Toigo to publish a white paper about the product, and it includes raves from front to back.
Toigo has written 13 books and published more than 1,000 articles on business technology, primarily on the subjects of storage and disaster recovery. He is a developer of disaster recovery plans for 68 organizations and consultant to the likes of Compaq, Cisco, AT&T, EMC and IBM.
His review of Revivio's time-addressable storage says it will "raise the bar, challenging existing providers of tape backup and multi-hop disk mirroring solutions to redefine their business value case - or be left behind."
Revivio is saying that its new storage technology will allow instant access to data as it existed at any previous time and to recover business applications in minutes. With Charles River Ventures backing the company, as well as allowing it to work in its Waltham basement for the first year, Revivio must be onto something. Flagship Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners are also among early investors.
"We don't know of anybody time-stamping like we are," said Revivio CEO Paul Lewis, adding that accessing data from "any point in time is our key distinction."
"And that's a pretty important one," he said.
In addition, Revivio's Time Addressable Storage (TAS) doesn't require software on the host, which Lewis says can degrade that host, and sits out of the primary data pattern.
"We're off to the side," he said. "On the network, but out of the way."
Installation is an easy plug-in.
"We wanted to keep it simple as a way to attract companies to get on board initially," Lewis said. "We'll solve a big problem for them."
Lewis said the product has been named but that the name is a secret until the New York launch. Early company literature refers to it as "the instant restore appliance" for its ability to do just that - "instantly restore data exactly as it existed at any point in time - a week, a day, or even one second ago." Toigo's white paper refers to the product's disk drives as TimeSafe and the Revivio recovered data as a TimeImage.
Revivio's TAS will reduce manpower, Lewis promises, as the data recovery takes place with the click of a mouse. For larger companies, he said, a significant savings will be realized in not having to purchase nearly as many tape cartridges. Toigo reports that companies regularly backing up millions of terabytes of data, spend about $1 million a year on cartridges alone.
Toigo also describes Revivio's product as superior to mirror-splits and remote replication because it is quicker, cheaper and not vendor specific. Pricing has yet to be determined, but Lewis said he's focusing on Fortune 500 companies, with product to be released this fall.
"I'd love to be able to say we've been able to transform part of an industry," Lewis said. "There aren't too many times in one's career that you get the chance to do something of the magnitude that we think we've been able to do."
From Mass High Tech, June 16, 2003
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