Yosemite Does Disk

While the major storage vendors work on bringing products down from the enterprise to SMBs, backup software vendor Yosemite Technologies Inc. is traveling against the traffic. Yosemite is trying to shake its tag as a pure SMB play to tackle the enterprise.

Yosemite today unveiled Yosemite Backup Advanced with disk backup and will soon rename its product line from the antiquated TapeWare brand to Yosemite Backup (see Yosemite Builds in Virtual Tape).

Until now, Yosemite has been sold mainly to SMBs through OEM deals with Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) (see HP Bundles Yosemite Into Tape). Backup Advanced is Yosemite's first product aimed at the enterprise.

Yosemite will keep its SMB product, which will be called Backup Basic, and will sell it directly to small enterprises with a sales staff beefed up after it closed a $10 million funding round last year (see Yosemite Lands $10M ). It will also have a series of progressively more advanced versions leading to Advanced.

Yosemites new product includes virtual tape library (VTL) support, bare metal disaster recovery -- the ability to quickly restore a damaged server by installing an image of the server known to be good -- and the ability to automate backup to different types of media.Those features might not be new to enterprise backup giants such as Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Legato, but Yosemite will try to find a market among new backup customers that don’t want to pay for the big guys.

Besides, says Yosemite marketing VP John Maxwell, with so many customers complaining that backup is such a pain, why wouldn’t people give the new guys a shot? (See Backup Still a Pain in the Neck.)

“Enterprise backup is tired,” Maxwell says. “All the products were developed to back up to tape.”

Well, that’s coming from someone whose main product evolved from tape backup, too. And until Yosemite completes its rebranding in May, it will still be called TapeWare. So even if Maxwell is correct about enterprise backup, Yosemite might have a tough time making its argument from that angle.

“TapeWare is their mainline product, and that boxes them in right out of the chute,” says IDC

research manager Rober Amatruda. “Their main challenge is to convince people they can do all these other things. They cut their teeth at the low end, and learned quite a bit to build up to this product. They have a slick product, but they’re a David-and-Goliath story.”Don Lopez, associate dean of Fresno City College, says David will have to do, because he can’t afford Goliath. Lopez’s campus used a beta version of Yosemite Backup Advanced, and he expects to sign on. The college had no backup software before and couldn’t afford available enterprise products. So even if Yosemite doesn’t stack up to Veritas and EMC, it could be a fit for customers who don’t know what they’re missing.

Lopez says Yosemite handled his backups to disk and tape, was easy to install, and the price was right. Backup Advanced’s list price starts at $3,499 for its Master Server, which manages all backup servers in the network. An installation of 200 application servers costs around $270,000, regardless of operating system.

“I looked at [Veritas] Backup Exec,” Lopez says. “But it was cost prohibitive. It’s not the devices I’m worried about anymore. It’s buying 150-client licenses that I’m worried about.”

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch