Veritas Software Corp. is looking to add to its disaster recovery product line by acquiring The Kernel Group Inc., a small company that makes technology that fully automates system recovery of Windows and all major Unix platforms.
Veritas officials on Tuesday declined to release financial details of the deal, but one executive said Veritas will keep open The Kernel Groups Austin, Texas, operations and retain most of the 49 employees there.
The Kernel Group, an 12-year-old privately held company, is the developer of Bare Metal Restore, an automated system recovery technology for Windows, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX platforms.
Veritas, of Mountain View, Calif., will now integrate that technology into its own NetBackup enterprise backup software product. NetBackup with Bare Metal Restore will be available by the end of the first quarter, said Julie Stewart, director of product management for NetBackup.
Bare Metal Restore also may later be integrated into other storage management software from Veritas.
Adding Bare Metal Restore will give Veritas NetBackup capabilities on more platforms than similar products from such competitors as Computer Associates International Inc. and Legato Systems Inc., Stewart said.
Bare Metal Restore can reduce the recovery time of systems brought down by natural disaster or data corruption from days and hours to minutes, which can reduce mistakes and lead to savings of millions of dollars, she said.
It eliminates the need to manually reconfigure disk hardware and enables users to avoid having to reinstall operating systems.
“More and more, data preservation is all about recovery, and how quickly you can recover,” Stewart said.