UPDATED 19:54 EDT / JULY 01 2020

CLOUD

VMware swoops in to buy disaster recovery firm Datrium

VMware Inc. said today it’s planning to make another acquisition, this time buying cloud-based disaster recovery specialist Datrium Inc.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Datrium has raised about $120 million in funding since its launch in 2012, including a $60 million Series D round led by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. two years ago.

Datrium, already a VMware partner, offers disaster recovery as a service for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services. It enables incremental backups that are encrypted, deduplicated and stored on Amazon S3 storage.

John Gilmartin, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of hyperconverged infrastructure, said in a blog post that the plan is to integrate Datrium’s technology into the company’s cloud portfolio and bolster its site recovery services. He noted that with hybrid cloud strategies becoming increasingly common among VMware’s customers, it’s more critical than ever for them to be able to maintain those environments and the apps that run within them.

“This is a significant move forward to help customers build hybrid clouds by combining the consistent infrastructure and operations of VMware Cloud with Datrium DRaaS to reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity,” he said.

Gilmartin added that disaster recovery-as-a-service is one of the fastest growing segments in the data protection market, valued at around $4.5 billion a year, according to a report from International Data Corp. He said it’s “ideally suited for hybrid cloud models where cloud economics and flexibility match the unpredictable characteristics of disaster scenarios.”

“We fundamentally believe that disaster recovery should be easy, and organizations should not be content with VM format conversions or lengthy rehydration periods when they are in the midst of a disaster,” said Datrium Chief Executive Officer Tim Page.

Nonetheless, VMware’s decision to acquire Datrium does come as a surprise to some analysts. Stu Miniman, senior analyst at SiliconANGLE’s sister market research firm Wikibon, said Datrium was originally a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that competed with VMware’s vSAN storage virtualization software, which combines with VMware’s vSphere to manage compute and storage from a single platform.

“Datrium has always been a VMware partner, so they should know what the fit is,” Miniman said. “VMware is positioning it as disaster recovery as a service, enhancing the VMware Cloud offering.”

The acquisition is VMware’s third significant one in as many months, following its move to buy Kubernetes security firm Octarine Inc. in May, and anti-malware research startup Lastline Inc. in June.

Datrium co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Sazzala Reddy spoke with SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE late last year (below) about the cloud’s value for disaster recovery, which he called a “disaster” to date.

“It’s never really worked for anybody,” he said. “What cloud offers you is an opportunity to simplify that and basically get your disaster recovery to be fail proof.”

Photo: Dell Technologies/Flickr

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