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Symantec Swallows Revivio

To help accelerate development of an enterprise continuous data protection (CDP) product, Symantec bought up the intellectual property and engineering team of struggling CDP pioneer Revivio.

Sean Macnew, director of Symantec's CDP and replication product group, confirmed the deal to Byte and Switch after several industry sources said they heard a deal was brewing. He says Symantec will offer CDP as part of its NetBackup enterprise backup software platform, and will discontinue sales of Revivio's Continuous Protection System (CPS) appliance. (See Revivio Vies for Backup Bucks.)

"One of the reasons we haven't been making a big deal of this is we are not at the stage where we want to unveil specifics of CDP," Macnew says. "We've been looking at CDP for quite a while. We view it as a superior form of data protection. Customers want it as part of NetBackup, not as a point technology."

He says Symantec has been working on developing CDP for NetBackup, but he doesn't expect a product until the second half of 2007. Symantec has near-CDP -- frequent snapshots for files -- as part of its Backup Exec Windows-based backup platform, but lacks continuous protection for applications such as Exchange, Oracle, and SQL Server. (See Microsoft and Symantec Cut SMB Tape.)

Even with Revivio's technology, Symantec finds itself behind backup software rivals EMC, CA, CommVault, and Asigra, which have developed or acquired CDP technology.

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