IBM Acquires Sanovi Technologies to Orchestrate Data Protection

Now that data protection spans everything from traditional backup and recovery to compete disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), managing those processes on an end-to-end basis has never been more challenging.

Aiming to simplify that task, IBM this week announced it has acquired Sanovi Technologies, a provider of orchestration and visualization tools optimized for managing data protection.

Daniel Witteveen, vice president of resiliency systems for IBM, says IBM’s goal is to make it simpler to manage any runbook data protection process based on the recovery time and point objective desired for any given application, database, server or process. Witteveen notes that IT organizations often start out with, for example, one recovery objective in mind that can be easily accomplished using traditional backup and recovery software. But over the course of the life of an application those requirements might change.

“Organizations may discover they need to start replicating data at the block level,” says Witteveen.

The orchestration tools developed by Sanovi Technologies make it simpler to migrate that application over to another suite of data protection technologies, says Witteveen.

Initially, Witteveen says, IBM plans to continue to operate Sanovi Technologies as an independent business unit until such time IBM is ready to make Sanovi Technologies a part of IBM global technology services.

Thanks, in part, to the rise of ransomware, data protection processes are being reevaluated across the enterprise. In most cases the technologies and processes being used to protect data may not need to change at all. But in those instances where it does many IT organizations are about to discover just how challenging it can be to migrate an existing application or server from one type of data protection to another.