Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Zerto, Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, Lands $13 Million From RTP Ventures

It’s a truism in life, as in business, that you have to plan for bad things to happen, and it’s especially true of increasingly precious digital data.

It would seem that the cloud — that nebulous place of unseen servers maintained by anonymous humans in huge, remote and unmarked buildings called data centers — can, in theory, have your back. That’s the idea behind Zerto, an Israel-based startup that uses cloud infrastructure for disaster recovery.

The company announced today that it had closed a $13 million Series C led by RTP Ventures, an affiliate of ru-Net Holdings. Also participating in the round were Battery Ventures; Greylock IL, the Israel-based outpost of Greylock Ventures; and U.S. Venture Partners. Murat Bicer, a managing director at RTP, is joining Zerto’s board. The round brings Zerto’s total capital raised to north of $34 million.

The old way of doing disaster recovery was expensive, and only companies willing and able to spend big could do it right. They’d build a redundant copy of their IT infrastructure, the point being to fail over to the copy in the event of a disaster, and keep everything running. Acquiring and maintaining the fail-over stuff effectively doubles the cost and effort.

Zerto’s approach takes advantage of a key cloud technology — virtualization, which is running several virtual computers within the confines of one or more physical computers. Time was, vital applications were too important to entrust to virtual machines, but nowadays pretty much everything is running on VMs.

Zerto moves the business of replication to the hypervisor, the software used to manage virtual machines. This is a key capability missing for enterprises that want to rely more on the cloud.

The company has had a busy year: Its staff has doubled, and lots of new customers have signed on, including Univita Health and University of Louisville Physicians. More than 100 cloud providers are taking advantage of the Zerto Cloud Ecosystem, up from 33 previously.

CEO Ziv Kedem and his brother Oded started Zerto in 2009. They were behind a previous disaster-recovery company called Kashya that was acquired by EMC for $150 million in 2006 and is now known by the EMC brand RecoverPoint.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik