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July 18, 2008

Zmanda has been doing a lot of advertising lately. And some of it is pretty agressive too. The company is working hard at applying open source principles in order to signicantly cut prices in the data backup market.

Whether it succeeds or not is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, there are many spotlights focused on the company, and Zmanda plans to make this a resounding success.

The data backup software firm says that its application costs less than twenty percent than comparable products sold by EMC and Symantec. So the question is, is MySQL data backup software ready for the large enterprise?

Zmanda sure seems to think so.

Some observers will tell you the answer is yes. To be sure, Zmanda has been a MySQL partner for many years. This simply means that many MySQL database users backup their systems using Zmanda's product.

Chander Kant, CEO of Zmanda says "we are to open source backup software what MySQL is to the open source database market. It's just as simple as that.”

So can Zmanda effectively displace long-time storage vendors like EMC and Symantec? As more and more enterprises make the move to Linux, MySQL, SugarCRM and other open source applications, they’ll probably be tempted to give Zmanda a good test drive.

But it's important to note that Zmanda does support closed-source applications as well.

In any business downturn, budget-conscious users could push back traditional commercial applications from large software companies.

That’s bad news and good news at the same time for VARs (value added resellers). IT solutions providers won’t make much profit selling low-cost Zmanda software, at least not at the beginning. However, providers that focus on selling Zmanda as a managed service can generate recurring managed storage revenue.

It could potentially be more difficult for Zmanda to displace EMC and Symantec in more traditional commercial backup environments such as Microsoft's Exchange Server, SQL Server and some Oracle applications.

Zmanda currently only has about 50 employees, not exactly a powerhouse that can easily "bring down" the likes of well-established niche players such as EMC, Symantec, IBM and a few others. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to watch this company and see exactly how it does it.

Source: IT Direction.

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