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IBM Acquires FilesX

Tivoli software
IBM acquire FilesX

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Frequently asked questions

FilesX is a privately held storage software company that specializes in continuous data protection with near-instant recovery software for applications and data. FilesX technology should complement the Tivoli storage software portfolio and our vision of enterprise data protection and recoverability by adding critical capabilities in continuous data protection of applications, databases, and file servers, and supports business users with near-instant recovery times. In addition, the FilesX acquisition reinforces IBM's mid market strategy by adding a simple and easy to use, full data protection solution – one that is also appealing to enterprise remote and branch offices.

1. Q. What are you announcing today?
A. IBM announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FilesX Corporation, a privately held storage software company with more than 100 customers in the United States and Israel. The acquisition is expected to close shortly. FilesX is headquartered in Newton, MA and has a development lab in Haifa, Israel. Following close IBM intends to integrate FilesX into IBM Software Group as a part of its Tivoli Software unit, and include the FilesX technology in IBM's flagship Tivoli Storage Manager family of offerings.

2. Q. What technology does FilesX provide?
A. Today, FilesX allows customers to better protect and recover data residing on Microsoft Windows servers. Much of this data has become mission critical to many businesses and thus, loss of data or system downtime is not acceptable. FilesX technology delivers improved Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) allowing granular snapshots as well as continuous data protection down to individual changes. With FilesX, users can quickly access lost mailboxes and don't have to wait for full recovery of servers which is the incumbent model today. In addition to lost mailboxes, users can also recover individual mail, attachments, or other objects. Businesses also demand improved Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) with respect to how long it takes to access data after a server failure of any kind. FilesX has patented technology which gives users almost immediate access to their stored data while the production server is fully restoring in the background. In addition, FilesX's disk to disk replication to a Disaster Recovery site combined with near-instant recovery allows clients to quickly restore after a catastrophic event.

3. Q. What is creating the need for FilesX's technology?
A. There are four primary business drivers creating need for this technology:

  1. Information Explosion: The surge in criticality and volume of data is outpacing IT's ability to manage it by traditional means, resulting in unacceptable backup windows and responsiveness.
  2. Information Location: Increasingly, mission critical information is residing outside the data center, in remote or branch offices where IT resources and budgets are not prepared to effectively manage this distributed data.
  3. Non-IT Influence: Line-of-Business demand for information access is resulting in shrinking acceptable data loss and causing major reductions in Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives.
  4. Data Governance: Business controls and compliance concerns are driving increasing information risk management and near-zero tolerance for data loss.

FilesX's continuous data protection capabilities, speed of data access in a recovery scenario, ease-of-use, and deep application protection for critical business applications such as Microsoft Exchange make it an excellent set of technologies to address this growing need.

4. Q: Can you provide scenarios where FilesX's technology would be used?
A. Initially, we see the top three buying occasions for this technology as:

  1. Desire to improve data protection at remote sites or branch offices where FilesX provides simple to use, cost-effective, disk-based data protection which can be centrally administered from the data center.
  2. Desire to improve backup processes where saving labor costs, improving application availability, and reducing data loss are paramount considerations. In addition, for small and mid-sized enterprises, FilesX helps to manage data where strong IT skills and/or best practice processes don't exist today.
  3. New or expanding use of mission-critical Microsoft applications, particularly Microsoft Exchange, where minimal application downtime and maximum granularity of recovery are desired to reduce data loss and improve overall administration efficiency.

5. Q: Upon close how will the FilesX technology fit with IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager?
A. The FilesX technology is completely complementary with Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). For starters, the progressive incremental backup methodology is entirely consistent with TSM's methodology and value proposition of helping customers minimize the amount of data requiring backup by copying changed data only. Also, customers desiring to add tape to their FilesX environment can effectively backup their FilesX solution directly to TSM today, and then TSM will take over tiered storage management of FilesX data to help reduce cost and assimilate backup processing of all enterprise data. Many FilesX customers today have implemented this exact scenario of supplementing their TSM environment in the data center with a FilesX solution in the remote/branch offices, or a FilesX solution for specific mission-critical servers where continuous data protection is desired.

Key Contacts by audience:

Q&A Contacts

Kelly Beavers
Storage Management

Venkat Raghavan
Market Management

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