Avamar

Avamar Inc. is waiting for the ink to dry on approximately $15 million in new funding, which it plans to spend on sales and marketing of its disk-backup software.

"We plan to announce funding within the next couple of weeks," says CEO Kevin Daly. "It's not quite closed, but it's completed."

If all goes as planned, Avamar will expand marketing and sales for its Axion product line, which is based on software that uses a kind of digital shorthand to slash the time required for disk-based backups. "First we chew data into pieces, and then only store what we didn't see before," Daly says.

Sounds like something folk might run from instead of buy, but Daly claims Avamar's technique cuts the operational costs of backing up data by more than half. "You can avoid media costs, communications costs, people costs. There's a very rapid payback." Forty customers have purchased the product so far, he says -- one of the latest being a fellow traveler in the storage market, Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT). (See Avamar Axion Backs Up Adaptec.)

Avamar sells its wares in two markets: For smaller companies that have 1 to 2 Tbytes of storage on hand, Avamar offers an appliance for about $45,000 that bundles Avamar's software with disk storage from undisclosed OEMs. For large enterprise customers with 20 Tbytes to 50 Tbytes of storage, Avamar produces software that runs with big disk systems from the likes of EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). Avamar's software runs under Unix and Linux, as well as Windows.