Avamar Gets More Dough: Page 2 of 3

The Irvine, Calif.-based startup, founded in 1999, will use the majority of the money to boost its marketing and sales divisions as it attempts to gain customers for Axion, its disk backup and recovery system launched last fall. Last week, the startup announced that it has partnered with managed storage services provider Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc., which has started incorporating its technology into its service offerings. Avamar says it expects to make other customer announcements soon (see Avamar Kicks It to Disk and Arsenal Uses Avamar).

The company, currently with about 45 employees, will be adding a few more to its sales and marketing staff, Daly says. Today, Avamar’s sales force is comprised of only eight people. Engineers make up between 60 and 65 percent of the company’s employees, but Daly says he expects that over time that number will drop to between 35 and 40 percent.

Avamar’s software allows companies to store their data as objects, (as opposed to files or blocks), which connect to multiple arrays of inexpensive Linux storage nodes. The software also uses a technique called "commonality factoring" to ensure that identical objects are stored only once to reduce the amount of data stored. The company claims this can allow companies to reduce the space required to store a given set of data by as much as 90 percent. Avamar also says Axion scales well beyond 1,000 terabytes (or 1 petabyte).

Architecturally, the Axion system is similar to the EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Centera, which also uses object-based storage and inexpensive disks. In fact, Avamar uses the same term to describe its system that EMC uses for Centera -- "content-addressed storage" (see EMC Makes Centera Compliant, EMC Sells Petabyte of Centera, and EMC Has Eyes for Huge Archives).

"Clearly, from a solution standpoint, I think they really have a story that resonates well with customers," says IDC's Amatruda. "This helps people free up resources that they have already deployed."