Catalogic Software first announced their exclusive distribution agreement with Storware, Inc. in June.  Six months later, I checked in with Peter Eicher, Director of Marketing, to see how things were going.  

VMblog:  To kick things off, give us a quick refresher about Storware.

Peter Eicher:  Storware develops multiple products in the data protection and data management arena, and Catalogic has partnered with them on two: vProtect and KODO. vProtect is focused on data protection for what I call "all the other hypervisors," that is, not VMware or Hyper-V, but hypervisors like Red Hat virtualization, Citrix Xen, Oracle VM, Nutanix Acropolis, KVM and more. KODO is a multi-use product with three focus areas. The first is protection of end points: that means file backup for desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. The second is secure internal file sharing. And the third is protection of SaaS data, like Office 365 and Box.  Clearly, given VMblog's focus, we should probably keep the discussion mostly to vProtect. 

VMblog: How do you see the market landscape for what you call "all the other hypervisors"?

Peter Eicher: It's an exciting area. To simplify discussion, I'll refer to all the other hypervisors as "open hypervisors." Clearly, VMware and Hyper-V are the market leaders, but more and more organizations are realizing that a little diversity in their hypervisor platforms can be really good idea. First, it can save a lot of money. Maybe you keep your Tier 1 production systems on VMware, but as you start to look at Tier 2 and 3 systems, as you look at test-dev infrastructure, you can identify a lot of places where an open hypervisor can get you everything you need at a much lower price point. At the same time, the open hypervisors continue to add new features, and they are more user friendly than ever.

VMblog: And where does vProtect come into the picture?

Peter Eicher: vProtect is really filling a gap in the market. Face it, there's no shortage of backup vendors, but most of them have neglected the open hypervisors. Nutanix has gotten the most attention, but for others like Red Hat, Xen, KVM and so on, it's hard to find a good backup solution. vProtect fills that role.

VMblog: What are users doing now? They still must protect those VMs.  

Peter Eicher: We see two main situations. First - and this is the scary one - we see users that just aren't backing up their open VMs. Even if those are just test systems, that's not a good idea. Imagine losing a VM you spent a couple of weeks working on, and now you have to recreate it. That's a lot of wasted time.  The second situation is that users go back to what's now the old-fashioned approach of using agents. They'll take a Windows or Linux agent from their backup software and install it in the VMs. That's like going backwards ten years. With vProtect, everything is agentless.

VMblog: Aren't users reluctant to deploy another backup solution?   

Peter Eicher: That was the case some years ago, but not anymore. Point solutions are widely accepted if they truly fill a gap. But another cool thing about vProtect is that it can serve as a front-end to your existing backup software. If you're running IBM Spectrum Protect, Veritas Netbackup or DellEMC NetWorker, vProtect can feed backups into those systems, which lets you use your existing backup infrastructure. Or you can deploy it standalone. It works with a whole range of backup targets and cloud.

VMblog:  Sounds good. So what's next for vProtect and Catalogic?

Peter Eicher: The Storware team is great. They release a new version roughly every three months. They just recently added support for Kubernetes, and a really cool feature that lets you manage hypervisor snapshots. As for Catalogic, we're actively recruiting partners for vProtect. We think it's a great niche product that you can take to your end users and help them fill a protection gap. We're also hoping to connect with sales and technical personnel at the hypervisor providers. So if you're interested in getting a closer look at vProtect, drop us a line!