Software Firm’s Real-Time Backup Aims to Halt Losses
By CHRISTOPHER KEOUGH
Staff Reporter
His computer seizing up and in the process making an important document disappear, Richard L. Liuag at first did what everyone does: get aggravated and call the tech department.
But then something out the ordinary happened: the file was recovered from an independent server where it had been automatically backed up the last time it was saved. The software that preserved the information for the president and chief executive of Swiftcomm Inc. is called LiveBackup, a product of Marina del Rey-based Storactive Inc.
The technology, in essence, allows users to turn back the clock in the event of machine or network failure and recover information from another server on which the data was backed-up pre-crash.
“We can roll you back 20 years and say ‘Don’t smoke,'” said Storactive’s chief executive, Tony Bautista, a former vice president of business development at Seagate Technology. “We have a time machine.”
By automatically backing up data from a hard drive or server at regular intervals or when auto saves are executed by a program the software does not require specific commands to back up. And because it moves blocks of data as opposed to complete files from a hard drive and stores them on the backup server, unwanted interlopers like viruses and worms are rendered ineffective.
Storactive was founded in 1997 by Mikhail Ryzhkin and Mary Skiba, two former Quarterdeck Corp. employees instrumental in that firm’s development of CleanSweep, a hard disk management and cleanup program. Quarterdeck was acquired by Symantec Corp. in 1998.
Bautista said the company soon began developing backup technology that operated on a real-time basis to compete with standard backup technologies that require set times for backup procedures and select the data that would be copied to a second server.
“The company decided, ‘Why don’t we go ahead and capture changes on a disk as they occur rather than waiting until the end of the day?'” Bautista said.
Storactive has raised $22.2 million so far, the most recent a $4 million investment last month from Smart Technology Ventures of Beverly Hills, which closed a $15.7 million second round. Other investors are Moore Capital and Mellon Ventures.
If things go well, Bautista said the company would generate $6 million in revenues this year, $2.5 million of which already is in the pipeline, and be cash flow positive by November. While Bautista doesn’t think he will need to raise any more money from VCs, he would not say when he expected the company to reach profitability.
Storactive declined to release revenue figures for 2001.
Swiftcomm, a Riverside-based wireless broadband Internet service provider and disaster recovery center, is one of Storactive’s first customers. Scheron Briones, Swiftcomm’s vice president of data center technology, said the company bought LiveBackup for use in-house and is working on a deal to offer it to its business customers through a partnership with a local application service provider.
Storactive, which charges an annual license fee of $129 per workstation, has a licensing deal pending with a partnership of Swiftcomm and Smart Digital Inc. an Irvine application service provider.
Details are being massaged, but Smart Digital will license LiveBackup from Storactive and install it on servers it rents at Swiftcomm’s data center. The service will be bundled with broadband service and Web site hosting. The cost of the service to the customer will depend on how much information is backed up, according to Chris Gunderson, president of Smart Digital.
“After the events of 9/11, it’s a whole lot like another Y2K,” said Briones. “Companies are allocating a lot of money to make sure they have disaster recovery plans.”
Michael Holton, principal at Smart Technology Ventures, said a management team that includes Bautista gave him confidence in the investment. Also helping is that LiveBackup already is shipping.
For Holton, the real lure was LiveBackup’s simple file-recovery technology, not the ability to rescue virus-infected PCs or whole networks that are disabled by a virus or something as devastating as a terrorist attack.
“That may get the buzz and the hype,” he said of the ability to restore a network. “The world is big enough alone with people just losing files. On a daily basis you’ll use this.”
