Cloud Backup Provider Carbonite Scales Up with Deal To Acquire EVault
Carbonite, one of the popular providers of backup services for consumers and small businesses, today agreed to acquire EVault for $14 million from disk drive vendor Seagate. EVault, which offers higher-end backup services with an on-premises appliance for mid-sized organizations, uses Microsoft's Azure public cloud to store data. The company also claims a one-hour failover.
EVault was founded in 1997 and acquired by Seagate in 2006. When the deal closes, likely next quarter, EVault will give Carbonite the ability to target larger enterprises and provide data protection from VMware-based virtual infrastructures. On an investor call with analysts to announce the deal, Carbonite President and CEO Mohamad Ali said EVault has 5,000 customers and its services are offered by 500 managed service providers. By acquiring EVault, Carbonite will compete with Barracuda Networks, CommVault and Datto, though there are a considerable number of players targeting small enterprises including Acronis, Arcserve, Asigra, Nasuni, Unitrends and Veeam, among others.
"EVault brings probably one of the most sophisticated cloud failover capabilities available in the market," Ali said on the call. "EVault is able to provide one-hour SLA failover. EVault can spin up that server in its cloud, and your business is up and running again off of that server. A lot of companies can only talk about some of the capabilities, [while] EVault probably has the most mature and capable version of it out there. Immediately we're able to expand what we can do, what we can offer [and] what size of customers we can service. I think competitively we're in a really great position."
The EVault Backup Services for Microsoft Azure allows customers to combine their cloud licenses under one enterprise agreement and provide protection for Linux, Unix and Windows-based application servers as well as Hyper-V and VMware ESXi VMs. The EVault service offers front-end data deduplication and uses the company's block-level processing to ensure only new and changed blocks of data are transmitted.
Whether Carbonite will further utilize Azure for its offering, or move EVault away from it, remains to be seen. David Raissipour, Carbonite's SVP of engineering and products said: "Carbonite already has highly efficient and scalable cloud infrastructure so the Azure platform wasn't a key component of the acquisition."
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/16/2015 at 1:12 PM