Asempra Assembles $20M

Asempra Technologies doesn't think of itself as a continuous data protection (CDP) company, but it has scored $20 million in Series B funding at least in part because of its CDP momentum. (See Asempra Secures $20M.)

Asempra, which calls itself a business continuity software provider, is among the first companies to claim a granular form of CDP that allows users to not only return to a previous point in time to recover data, but to earmark a specific item in the application for rapid recovery. So far, it's an approach touted mainly by Mendocino Software, whose event-based CDP debuted last fall. (See Mendocino Makes an Event of CDP.)

Asempra claims to be even more granular than Mendocino, though the comparison might be a matter of semantics. Using software installed on a 1U, Linux-based appliance called the Business Continuity Server, Asempra continuously tracks Windows files, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL databases by transaction, execs say. (See Asempra Launches Server .) This enables users to recover entire files based on specific words, database items, or other minutiae.

According to Asempra execs, their wares not only get back the transaction specified, but guarantee that the rest of the surrounding document or database is consistent. That is, all part of the same version.

"Our CDP is transaction aware... There's no storage snapshot, no block-level activity," boasts VP of marketing and products Marty Ward, who was formerly director of product marketing at Veritas. Instead of tracking big blocks or files, he claims Asempra focuses at the byte level.