Features - Storage Innovations:

AVAMAR GRANTED PATENT FOR DISK-BASED DATA PROTECTION TECHNOLOGY

Avamar Technologies Inc. a provider of innovative data protection solutions, announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted Avamar Patent No. 6,826,711 entitled, "System and Method for Data Protection with Multidimensional Parity," for its flexible and coordinated data protection technology. This is the third patent granted to Avamar within the last 12 months.

The new patent provides coverage for Avamar's redundant array of independent nodes (RAIN) technology, which protects data stored in the Avamar Axion backup solution. Axion is the industry's most efficient disk-based backup and recovery solution for enterprise data; it eliminates unnecessary redundancy found in the traditional backup process, reducing secondary storage by 90 percent and reducing daily backup and network traffic by 99 percent. Axion uses RAIN technology to selectively reintroduce efficient, structured redundancy -- redundancy designed to protect against network and hardware failures -- in order to maintain the system's high availability.

"By adding structured, purposeful redundancy to an Axion system, we can ensure that customer data remains secure and available, even in the face of failures that would cripple traditional backup solutions," said Kevin Daly, CEO of Avamar. "Even with the added redundancy, our technology is still so efficient that Axion is less expensive than traditional tape solutions, despite using all disk storage."

Traditional disk-based storage subsystems commonly use redundant array of independent disks (RAID) technology in order to protect against disk drive failures. For instance, if one disk fails in a RAID array, one or more of the other disks in the array will carry enough information to rebuild the data lost on the failed disk drive. Avamar's RAIN technology is a more flexible version of RAID technology, providing redundancy across storage "nodes" as well as disks. In an Axion solution, the Axion server is actually one or more networked "nodes" (servers with attached or external disk), which work in concert to provide parallel processing power and throughput for backup and recovery.

"Our RAIN technology protects us even when an entire server node fails," Daly added. "Normally, this level of availability is extraordinarily expensive, requiring mirrored storage and mirrored application servers."

Avamar sells Axion as a bundled hardware/software appliance and as a software-only solution. In addition to RAIN, Avamar also provides replication software, which can replicate data from an Axion system to another site, in order to provide fully automated disaster recovery across a local or wide area network. Since its launch, the Axion product has been adopted by several leading Fortune 1000 enterprises, including QUALCOMM, MCI and Bechtel, as well as numerous small, medium and large businesses.