AWS-focused startup Clumio ramps up their support of the platform on which they were built, while also achieving recognition from AWS for their achievements.
Chadd Kenney, Clumio’s VP and Chief Technologist
LAS VEGAS — Enterprise backup-as-a-service product provider Clumio launched its offering and then formally emerged from stealth earlier this year. While the long-term future is to fully support the multi-cloud universe, for now, the main cloud focus is on AWS, the cloud on which Clumio is built. The company has announced the expansion of their offering to support native AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Block Store. They have also announced that they have reached Advanced Technology Partner status in the AWS Partner Network [APN], which they are emphasizing is no small feat for a company of their short vintage.
Clumio is led by by Poojan Kumar, the co-founder and former CEO of PernixData, which was acquired by Nutanix. When Clumio launched in August, they announced they had raised $51 million in their Series A and B funding rounds, and last month they announced a Series C round which raised a further $135 million.
So why are investors rushing to grab a stake in Clumio, which competes in a crowded secondary market filled with other investor darlings like Cohesity and Rubrik, as well as legacy enterprise backup vendors who have been aggressively pivoting their technologies to remain relevant?
“Everyone has parts and pieces that work together,” said Chadd Kenney, Clumio’s VP and Chief Technologist, who came to the company in September from Pure Storage, where he had been the VP of Products and Solutions. “We provide one single platform that allows for the creation of one policy and then applying it to any data source regardless of whether they come from on-prem, cloud or SaaS sources. Enterprises aren’t looking for iterative fixes that deploy a little faster. They are looking for something that truly transforms the way that they leverage the cloud. That’s the biggest differentiator we have.”
Kenney emphasized that Clumio does more than simply use snapshots to provide fast restoration to a specific point in time.
“We deliver data loss and malware protection where the snapshots aren’t right alongside the production data,” he said. “We keep a single snapshot for faster restore, but longer-term retention is in an air-gapped solution outside. We mount the snapshot and do a delta between the snapshot and the current snapshot and send them into archives. The customer pays on a per TB cost model and we do all the retention, so they don’t pay any of the AWS costs to retain the snapshot. This provides a true backup – not just snapshots to the storage array. We can also do single file restore with a global search in the GUI.”
When they launched, Clumio was focused on on-prem VMware deployments and the VMware Cloud on AWS. Just before the AWS Re:Invent event, they announced their expansion to support native AWS services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).
“Most people size AWS retention based on cost, rather than on their business requirements,” Kenney said. “We focus on increasing retention without increasing the cost. Clumio is a true SaaS service that’s not just a consumption model. It is very predictable, where the customer pays the same amount and doesn’t have to size capacity and compute.”
Costs are determined by the number of VMs protected.
“The way we provide data protection for EBS reduces complexity and makes costs predictable,” Kenney stated.
The achievement of APN Advanced Technology Partner status after only two years of development work marks an important milestone for Clumio.
“We’ve been building on top of them for the last two years, and they are our core platform,” Kenney emphasized.
Clumio is at Re:Invent this week at booth #611.
