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EMC Buying Dantz
Bug-Y2K writes "Looks like storage giant EMC, is buying longtime Mac software company Dantz Develpment. Dantz, makers of Retrospect have been the leader in backup technology for the Mac OS since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Mindshare has been slipping of late but the product is known for being better at restores than anything out there. I wonder what lies in store for Retrospect now?"
Dantz owns a patent, 5,150,473 Data storage format for addressable or sequential memory media which essentially covers the use of a on-disk catalog to record what is written to tape for faster retrieval and creating incrementals. This patent can be very cumbersome for companies trying to enter the Mac OS X backup market. With that said, there are quite a few backup solutions available or coming to Mac OS X - BakBone, Avail, SGL, Tolis Group, and more. I know that the Tolis Group doesn't use a catalog the same way and doesn't do point-in-time incremental snapshots like Retrospect does. I don't know if anyone else coming to Mac OS X does. It is rumored that OmniGroup's OmniBackup was killed over this patent issue. Too bad, since that was the only tape backup application for Mac OS X Server at the time.
Unfortunately, for a long time, the Mac Server was de-prioritized. The Windows Server got a lot of development for a long time and after a lot of complaints on the Retro-Talk list, development of the Mac Server finally started up again. The Retro-Talk list was plain nasty for awhile.
There's more to it than that.
Apple's xSan (real soon now) and the xServe RAID are actually generating interest in the enterprise market. Lots of net admins KNOW that they need something more 'beefy' than Windows to run their SANs, and Apple is making what looks like drop-dead easy and super-cheap SANs a reality.
Trust me, the admin at my work came to my desk yesterday and asked if I could prepare a report for consolidating storage on Apple metal instead of Dell. Dell wants to sell us more SCSI equipment, which is total overkill for our needs. We don't need the throughput of 36 SCSI drives in a RAID5, it's not worth the cost compared to something like the xServe RAID.
Also, our CIO has been pushing for OpenDirectory instead of AD, to make it easier for our databases, vendors, and appliances to tie-in. And I can make OD and SAMBA work together and perform better than AD. All this is probably gonna happen on Apple metal, at least until the admins are comfy enough with *NIX to move to straight-BSD.
EMC's purchase of Dantz is part of EMC's long-term plan to become a software vendor. I bet they license retrospect to Apple in the xSan, and other vendors in their NAS and SAN projects.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I never bothered upgrading from version 5. I was very irritated with v.5's inability to run scheduled backups, which is why I bought the software in the first place. I had to run a cron job just to launch the program. There was no support, no fix. Just a new version which required new money. As OSX has aged, v.5 hasn't aged well with it. Now the operation log frequently locks because Retrospect doesn't exit cleanly and I need to cold boot in order to free it (Haven't figured out how to do that any other way. Any tips?) Requiring people to purchase upgrades in order to fix buggy software is poor customer support. It erodes customer loyalty. I didn't realize they had such a broad stranglehold on Mac backup solutions because of that patent. That explains their arrogance. Being bought out may be good for Retrospect in the long run IF the code is sold, not the development team. At least we can hope. I have to admit that the move to OSX has broken many companies. I have been surprised at how companies like Dantz and Palm haven't dedicated ample resources to embrace the new regime. ;)
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