News

Microsoft Acquires Data Protection Firm InMage

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• July 11, 2014

Microsoft has acquired San Jose, Calif.-based InMage for an undisclosed amount, it announced Friday.

InMage is a provider of converged disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, with a focus on continuous data protection. The company is known for its high-end Scout line of disaster recovery appliances.

InMage's converged systems are available in various configurations with compute storage and network interfaces. The InMage-4000 is available with up to 48 physical CPU cores, 96 threads, 1.1TB of memory and 240TB of raw storage capacity. It supports 10GigE storage networking and built-in GigE Ethernet connectivity.

InMage's solutions don't overlap with Microsoft's, it should be noted. Azure StorSimple, which Microsoft plans to release in August, offers primary storage with Azure as a tier, while InMage offers disaster recovery using the cloud or a secondary site as a target.

Over time, InMage will be rolled into the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery service to add scale to the company's newly added disaster recovery and business continuity offering. Microsoft had earlier announced plans to enable data migration to Azure with Scout, InMage's flagship appliance.

"InMage Scout continuously captures data changes in real time as they occur and performs local backup or remote replication simultaneously with a single data stream," reads a description on InMage's Web site. "It offers instantaneous and granular recovery of data locally and enables push-button application level failovers to remote sites to meet local backup and/or remote DR requirements, thus going above and beyond the protection offered by conventional replication backup and failover automation products alone."

It also collects data from production servers in real time into memory before they're written to disk, and moves the data to the InMage Scout Server. This eliminates any added I/O load from the backup or replication process. It also has built-in encryption, compression and WAN acceleration. It supports backups of Hyper-V, VMware ESX and Xen virtual machines.

The Scout portfolio also protects Linux and various Unix environments, and the company offers specialized appliances for Exchange Server, SAP, Oracle SQL Server, SharePoint, virtualization and data migration.

"Our customers tell us that business continuity -- the ability to backup, replicate and quickly recover data and applications in case of a system failure -- is incredibly important," said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft's corporate vice president for cloud and enterprise marketing, in a blog post announcing the acquisition.