History 2005: NetAp Secures Decru

NetApp has blown its wad, $272 million, 80% in stock and 20% in cash, to get Decru, a pioneer in encryption/ decryption appliances for storage.

The principal advantage of its DataFort device is that it encrypts data “at rest,” which means behind firewalls.

It is attached to an FC switch, and encrypts data traveling to the SAN, then decrypts data traveling from storage network to the server.

“Latencies range from tens of μs in SAN and tape products to the low hundreds in NAS. So they’re completely imperceptible. In fact, most of our customers find that their backups accelerate because of the fact that we pipeline the backups as well as compress inside the appliance,” explained Decru’s CEO Dan Avida, in a conference call following the acquisition’s annoucement.

This is expensive for a company with $6 million in revenue for 2004, around 73 employees and a hundred or so customers (not to mention numerous partners that read like a Who’s Who of the storage industry: 3PAR, ACAL, ADIC, BlueArc, Brocade, Cisco, EMC, HOS, HP, IBM, LightSand, McData, NearTek, Oracle, Sanrad, Sun, Spectra Logic and StorageTek), but which nevertheless even forecasts sales of $35 million this year.

Decru, founded in 2001 and based in Redwood City, CA, had raised $45 million in funding to date.

NetApp and Decru, which will become a business unit headed by Decru’s CEO Dan Avida, are already working together and have offered, notably, a common proposition for the credit card sector.

“Percentagewise, NetApp is about a 5th of our business at this moment,” said Evida.

Among the other players involved in encryption on disk or tape, a market with a full future before it, we would note such companies as CRU-Dataport, Dantz (with new Retrospect 7 for Windows), Digital Security International, DISUK, Ingrian Networks, Intradyn, Kasten Chase, NeoScale Systems, PC Guardian Technologies and Vormetric.

Decru apparently holds only 2 patents, one on an encryption system and the other on a streamoriented interconnect, both for network storage and both attributed to Avida and CTO Serge Plotkin.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 210 on July 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.