History 2005: NetApp Acquired VTL Specialist Alacritus

With the acquisition of Alacritus Software, it seems NetApp is not entering into the tape industry, but into virtual tape library (VTL) backup and continuous data protection (CDP) using disks, which is different.

The transaction is valued at the modest sum of roughly $11 million in cash for the Pleasanton, CA-based start-up founded in 2000.

The 2 companies already worked together following an accord that dates from December 2004, involving a solution that combines Alacritus’ Securitus software with NetApp’s NearsTore and FAS systems.

VTL, a system in which data are written on disks in tape format is now a mature technology in many firms’ offering, including ADIC, Diligent, EMC, FalconStor, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, Neartek, Overland, Quantum, Sepaton and StorageTek.

Alacritus will also bring in its dowry CDP, a time-addressable storage solution, an application for the future that it calls Chronospan, on which it is still hard at work, and which has created quite a stir within the storage industry. Here, only data changes are stored on disks, which takes up less space and allows for a system turn-back recovery to any point in the past.

The other CDP players include InMage, Mendocino Software, Mimosa Systems, Revivio, Storactive, TimeSpring Software and XOsoft.

The final acquisition, expected to close in 2005, essentially boils down to a technological acquisition that perfectly rounds out NetApp’s activity portfolio.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 208 on May 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.