Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge

Cisco and NetApp have invested in Datos IO, a business cloud backup company that says its technology simplifies the process of backing up data from enterprise data centers and public cloud environments, working across both legacy and new database technologies.

The three-year-old startup announced the investment this week but stopped short of saying how much the two enterprise data center technology behemoths have put behind it. In its announcement, Datos said the investment was “strategic” for NetApp and Cisco.

While investing in tech companies is common for Cisco, this is the first time NetApp has made this kind of investment, according to Forbes.

Traditional IT vendors like them have been disrupted by public cloud, but there is still opportunity for them in leveraging their deep enterprise expertise and decades-long customer relationships to help companies set up and manage hybrid infrastructure that consists of both cloud services and internal corporate data centers. Datos’s business cloud backup technology appears to be particularly strong in this hybrid play, having recently secured well-known customers like Home Depot, Macy’s, ACI Worldwide, eBay, and OpenTable.

A recent Uptime Institute survey of enterprise data center operators found that many companies still have plans to meet new demand for data center capacity by building new facilities and leasing colocation space, in addition to deploying workloads in the cloud. About one-third said they would build new data centers and one-fifth said they would lease colocation space, which means not only is a lot of enterprise IT capacity is staying in existing data centers, there will be more of it in the future.

Datos says its architecture differentiates in the market for business cloud backup in the following three ways:

• An elastic data management engine that can be scaled up or down based on load and provides direct transfer of data from data sources to secondary storage thereby eliminating the inherent shortcomings of media-server or appliance-based backup and recovery solutions
• Industry-first semantic deduplication that provides an order of magnitude higher storage savings enabling Datos IO to protect and move data to the cloud far more efficiently than other solutions for both traditional and third platform applications
• Rich data services (e.g. BI, search) built on top of a globally distributed metadata catalog. This completely eliminates any restriction on how data can move between clouds allowing customers to use whatever cloud is best suited for their application requirements