EMC Corp.’s purchase of Kashya Inc. will give EMC its own continuous data protection technology, will bring more features to its Invista product line, allow it to bring its RecoverPoint technology in-house and will give resellers additional opportunities to design and implement replication and backup systems for businesses, according to EMC officials.
Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, which makes storage software and hardware, announced earlier this month it is acquiring Kashya, whose networked storage products include the KBX 5000 continuous data protection appliance. The deal is valued at US$153 million and will give EMC additional staff in Israel, where Kashya’s research and development operations are based.
“Because the majority of development resources used within Kashya are actually based in Israel, what this does is it kick-starts an EMC Israel software development centre which is really following up on the work that we started in India and that we’ve also started in China,” said Rob Emsley, EMC’s senior director for product marketing. “It very much expands our global presence from a software development perspective to other parts of the world.”
The purchase will bring benefits to resellers who want to design networked storage systems, said Kevin Quinlan, director for EMC Canada’s software group.
“The channel will certainly find benefit in this set of products that go beyond just reselling, since there are opportunities to offer assessment, design and implementation services to go along with the sale,” Quinlan stated in an e-mailed response to questions.
EMC plans to absorb Kashya’s operations into its software group, and will use Kashya’s remote replication technologies in its Invista product line.
Emsley said this will allow Invista to support additional storage-area networking products made by other vendors, such as San Jose, Calif.-based Brocade Communications Systems Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.
In addition to adding new features to Invista, EMC also plans to use Kashya technology in its RecoverPoint continuous data production product.
“We get this combination of replication with network-based virtualization and continuous data protection, all for the purchase price of Kashya.”
Continuous data protection has the advantage of allowing companies to backup data without requiring action from users, said Rhoda Phillips, research manager for storage software at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.
“It takes away the manual aspect of backing up,” she said. “With the Kashya solution, it does time stamping and has a few additional features. The key thing with CDP is you don’t have to monitor it. You can just set it and it will run, and it can take more granular snapshots, reducing your recovery time and your backup time.”
Using Kashya’s CDP technology in RecoverPoint will give EMC its own intellectual property, Emsley said. Currently, RecoverPoint is based on code that EMC licences from Mendocino Software Inc. of Fremont, Calif.
“When we introduced the EMC RecoverPoint last year, that is based upon technology that we licence from a third party,” he said. “Because Kashya also provides the continuous data protection solution, we can leverage that capability that is now EMC (intellectual property) inside EMC RecoverPoint.
No longer do we need to in the long term licence technology from a third party.”
EMC has not decided whether it will retain the Kashya brand name or sell all Kashya technologies using EMC brands.
“As far as our rollout of any new releases of the Kashya product and what branding and naming we’ll use, that’s something we’ll be very much actively engaged in over the next 90 days,” as company officials decide how to integrate Kashya into EMC, Emsley said.
Although she thinks it’s a good acquisition, Phillips said EMC will have to train its sales staff on where to sell Kashya and where to sell EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) replication products.
“This is going to push them into more heterogeneous environments, selling asynchronous replication,” she said of Kashya. “I think they have some work to do as far as making sure there is not a whole lot of conflict within the sales force. They’re going to have to some training – ‘this is where you sell SRDF, this is where you sell RecoverPoint, this is where you sell the Kashya solution,’ whatever that becomes.”