DataGravity for Availability is a separate product that sits on top of Veeam, and provides it with a behavior-driven security capability. For now, it only works with Veeam, but the plan is to ultimately extend it to other vendors.
NEW ORLEANS — Nashua N.H.-based DataGravity has announced both a new partnership with Veeam and a new solution offering, DataGravity for Availability. It enhances the Veeam Availability Suite, working with it to automatically respond to data exposure and security threats in a Veeam backup repository.
DataGravity was formed in May 2012 by Paula Long and John Joseph, who previously built Equallogic and sold it to Dell. In its original incarnation, DataGravity integrated data security, search and data protection in a single hardware platform. In 2015, however, the company made a major pivot.
“We changed the entire company in 2015,” said David Siles, DataGravity’s Chief Technology Officer. “We had been a storage company, with our analytics component. We then made the decision to exit the storage business, and we are now 100 per cent software – a virtual appliance. We originally supported VMware as a storage partner. We are now an ISV – supporting all the companies we used to compete with, with a solution delivered in a software form, and with a much tighter focus on virtualization than before.”
In their initial years, DataGravity’s partnering agreements were limited, and focused on VMware. Now, with the ability to integrate much more freely after the shift in strategic focus, partnerships have become much more critical to the company.
“We have about a dozen such relationships,” said Paula Long, DataGravity’s co-founder and CEO. “We would have more, but we don’t yet have the capability to support them. We are 100 per cent driven by customer requests in our partnering decisions, and we had a lot of requests for this one. We also look to partner with companies who partner right – who are willing to technically partner with you fully, and are willing to look at bugs and not just blame you. We also want partners who will go to market with you. Veeam has been very good to us. We bring a lot of technology to them though, so it’s not a one-sided thing.”
DataGravity Availability enhances Veeam’s ability to protect data by using analytics to provide compete visibility into the data stored in each VM.
“Veeam does a great job at availability, but as part of their platform vision they also want to tackle visibility, compliance and e-discovery,” Siles said. “They decided to achieve it by partnering with us, and we began discussing the possibility of partnering at least year’s VMworld. Our globally-federated search engine solves that last-mile problem for the regulated world. We can shift the architecture from being time-driven to behavior-driven. We watch what specific users are doing, and provide the fine-grained details of what changed between point A and point B. If, for example, someone from marketing is poking around in finance data, where they really shouldn’t be, we will notice that.”
Other vendors coming out of the security space deal with these issues, but Siles said that DataGravity brings some advantages to the table.
“We have a very simple to use interface,” he said. “Our product is not a ‘security person product.’ It’s for IT generalists, or data protection admins, and is an extension of the environment they already work in. We make everybody in IT an IT security superhero – they just don’t know it.”
“A lot of these products also stop when it comes to data recovery, like the plumber who comes in and turns off the water but leaves you with a basement of water,” Long said. “We do the cleanup – the whole forensics.”
DataGravity for Availability is sold as a separate product on top of Veeam Availability, although the expectation is that customers will typically buy them together at the same point of purchase.
“DataGravity for Availability today supports only Veeam, but as we get customer demand to support additional solutions, we expect that will grow,” Long said.
