Barracuda Expands Online Storage Service With Yosemite Buy

Security appliance vendor Barracuda Networks is beefing up its online backup offerings with the acquisition of storage software vendor Yosemite Technologies.

Barracuda this week said it acquired Yosemite for an undisclosed sum in late December, and has since incorporated Yosemite's backup technology into its Barracuda Backup service.

That technology complements existing backup service that Barracuda started late last year with the acquisition of BitLeap, a developer of appliances that allow data backup to a local storage device and to an online service, said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management for Barracuda.

Yosemite adds two key capabilities to Barracuda's nascent storage business, Pao said.

First, Yosemite brings agents that allow native backup of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Windows System State, Pao said. The BitLeap technology allowed agentless backups of the data, but the Yosemite technology allows more efficient backup of data from those specific applications.

Second, Barracuda gets access to a well-known line of stand-alone data protection software, which it will continue to offer under the Yosemite brand, Pao said. The company has also set up a new group, BarracudaWare, to handle software sales.

Sales of stand-alone software is new for Barracuda, as the company has sold only appliances in the past, Pao said.

However, Pao said, the company is not yet discussing whether it is planning any software-only offerings in its core spam-filtering and Web-filtering business. But he did not say that it was not possible.

"Barracuda has made a business of providing products in a form factor that customers require," he said. "If the customers one day decide they want services-based software from Barracuda, we're certainly open to that."

Barracuda plans to keep the acquisition as transparent as possible to solution providers of both companies, Pao said. "We would like to see how to expand the product offerings of both to the legacy Barracuda and legacy Yosemite partners," he said.

Yosemite CEO George Symons left the company as a result of the acquisition.

Barracuda is not the first security appliance vendor to move into storage via acquisitions.

SonicWall, of Sunnyvale, Calif., in November of 2005 acquired Lasso Logic, a developer of CDP appliances.