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Yosemite Server data backup product. Barracuda's move into the hot deduplication space is driven by acquisitions. Barracuda acquired dedupe IP when it bought BitLeap LLC last November, and the BarracudaWare Yosemite Server Backup comes from the acquistion of Yosemite Technologies in January. The new Yosemite product uses the BitLeap deduplication with Yosemite's application-aware backup software agents for granular backups of Microsoft Exchange, SQL and Windows system state information.
snapshots within its application agents, which are deployed on an on-site appliance as part of Barracuda Backup Service.
The agents store only delta changes to incremental snapshots, and are aware of changes in the applications they're protecting. BitLeap's dedupe can vary segment length up to 1 MB chunks according to the data it receives from an application. The combination of the two produce content-aware data deduplication, Pao said.
The on-site appliance dedupes Barracuda Backup Service customer data before sending it to Barracuda's data centers, and data is further reduced after it reaches the back-end infrastructure.
Data deduplication a must-have feature in data backup software
Data deduplication is rapidly becoming a checklist item for data backup software. Since January, vendors including CommVault Systems, CA Inc., Acronis Inc. and IBM Corp. have added dedupe with various differentiators such as dedupe to tape (CommVault and CA) or not charging for the feature (IBM). Others, such as Asigra, EMC Corp.'s Avamar and Symantec Corp.'s PureDisk have included dedupe for years.
"Does this give them any particular edge?" Gartner analyst Adam Couture said of Barracuda. "Not really. Most competitors already do deduplication. It's getting to be table stakes."
Pao countered that Barracuda intends to compete on price. The Barracuda Backup 100 starts at $999, and the BarracudaWare Yosemite Server Backup ranges from $299 to $1499 for the Yosemite Server Backup Unlimited. Backup Unlimited can protect an unlimited number of servers on an unlimited number of backup servers. He said Barracuda is mainly competitive with Symantec Backup Exec, which is scheduled for an upgrade with dedupe later this year.
"We're looking to take Backup Exec head on," he said. "We can offer cost savings over their licensing."