Start-Up’s Profile: Lortu Software

Company
Lortu Software, S.L.
 
Headquarters
Bilbao, Spain
 
Born in
January 2006 (incorporated as Lortu in January 2006, though the company have been doing R&D on de-dupe since 2003)
 
Financial Funding
Self-funded but first round expected before the end of this year.
 
Main executives

• Carlos Ardanza, CEO and founder: has more than 25 years of experience in software design and development, with a substantial part at Panda Security where he had different positions such as R&D director and director of new technologies
• Juan Carlos Fernandez, business development manager: served more than 12 years in Panda Security where he was international tech support manager and later solution manager

Number of employees
Less than 10
 
Technology
It’s a post-process byte-level differencing de-de that is data agnostic, meaning that the process can be apply to any kind of file format or file type and can be used with user’s current backup software. The company claims a reduction between 20 and 100 times on its backup appliances for local storage. They run an internal procedure which prevents the system from running out of space as oldest files are delete in accordance with the policy defined by the user: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual retention.

It also offers a remote backup service without requiring another appliance for remote backups or to have a remote facility.

Replication is an optional feature with the following steps:

• Extraction of the new information stored that day.
• Compression.
• Encryption using AES algorithm.
• Uploading the file with the replication data to the replication server.

Components of the solution, based on the following servers:

• Lortu Data Appliance: installed at the offices of the client
• Replication server: to replicated data from one or several appliances; it can be installed at a remote location belonging to the client, or at the Lortu Data Center, or a data center of a Lortu-certified distributor or ISP.
• Central server: located at Lortu that monitors all appliances and generates reports and email alerts.

Products
Lortu Data Appliance (LDA) family with three models designed for companies of different sizes, all of them to store around 100 full backups locally and to replicate the data each day to a remote location.

• LDA1: small RAID-1 appliance for small companies storing up to 200GB and replicating them remotely through low bandwidth connection such as ADSL
• LDA2: for SMBs, with RAID-6, storing daily up to 1.2TB replicating the data remotely through a 2Mb connection.
• LDA3: RAID-6 appliance storing up to 4TB per day and with replication through a 5Mb connection.

Roadmap
Models with more capacity and support for new platforms so that more Backup Service Providers and ISPs can offer remote backup services for LDAs in both standard and cloud storage systems.
 
Distribution and OEM
100% channel focused but provides OEMs with the option of integrating its de-dupe engine into third party products
 
Competitors
In software or appliances: Acronis, AppAssure, Arkeia/Kadena, Atempo, Atlantis Computing, BakBone, Barracuda Networks, BitSpeed, CommVault, Dell/Ocarina, Data Storage Group, Druva, EMC/Avamar/Data Domain, Exagrid, Exar, FalconStor, GreenBytes, IBM/Diligent, id7, Infineta, InQuinox, Luminex, NetApp, Permabit, Quantum, Revinetix, Riverbed, ROBObak, Sepaton, Symantec, etc.