Nakivo, a startup developer of cloud storage technology, has entered the market with a cloud storage technology that takes advantage of Amazon Web Services to provide the capacity to protect VMware virtual machines and their data.

Nakivo Backup & Replication provides customers and their channel partners with the ability to back up VMware virtual machines and their data to the Amazon Cloud within 10 minutes from when installation starts, all at half the price of competitive offerings, said Sergei Serdyuk, director of product management at the Campbell, Calif.-based vendor.

Nakivo is targeting traditional solution providers in the SMB market looking for a way to help customers move backup data to the cloud, Serdyuk said.

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"One of our mantras is simplicity," he said. "For backup in the Windows environment, it takes two clicks in 30 seconds to get installed. Customers can be doing backup jobs within 10 minutes. And, you don't need any manuals."

Serdyuk, citing the most recent semi-annual IDC Digital Universe study, said that the next decade will see a 50 times growth in data and a 75 times growth in the number of files stored but only a 1.5 times growth in the number of personnel to handle that growth. He also said that Gartner predicts a 500 percent growth in the number of virtual machines needing protection by 2015 compared to today.

"That means there will be much more data, many more virtual machines, with far fewer people," he said.

Nakivo is looking to make it easier for channel partners to help customers manage that growth by taking advantage of storage clouds, Serdyuk said.

Nakivo Backup & Replication automatically backs up virtual machines data to Amazon Web Services for about 10 cents per GB per month for the cost of the service, he said. "This is a starting point for us," he said. "Technically, we can integrate with Google Cloud and Rackspace."

The technology does not protect data in physical machines, he said.

The Nakivo software to manage the cloud storage data protection capabilities is available in two versions. The Essentials Edition, which works with VMware Essentials Edition, costs $199 per socket, but like the VMware technology, it is limited to six sockets. The Pro Edition, with no limit in the number of sockets, costs $399 per socket.

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Nakivo's Serdyuk said that the pricing is about half the cost of using more established offerings, including those from Veeam, Dell Quest and Acronis, which all charge about $800 per socket. Other versions, which allow the protection of both virtual and physical machines, can cost up to $2,000 per socket, he said.

Nakivo Backup & Replication offers live backup support for such applications running in VMware virtual machines as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL server, Oracle 11g, SAP and Java. It works in both Windows and Linux environments.

Also included is near-continuous data protection, which automatically backs up changes to data every five minutes.

The software also offers block-level data deduplication with a reduction ratio of up to 30-to-1, as well as compression of data by up to 50 percent after it is deduped. "These are options so that a customer can turn them off if there is already a physical device handling these operations," he said.

The software currently backs up data in virtual machines only, but next year it could also include physical machines, Serdyuk said.

"But, virtualized environments are growing much faster," he said. "Some companies are trying to bridge the gap between virtual and physical machines, but I don't think that's been so successful so far."

Nakivo Backup & Replication is currently in beta testing and is slated to be available commercially on Oct. 30.

Nakivo was founded in 2011 and is funded by its founders. While the company is headquartered in Campbell, Calif., its R&D is handled in Kiev, Ukraine.

PUBLISHED OCT. 1, 2012