Synerway promotes Enterprise CDP

Synerway (www.synerway.com), one of the top french backup vendors, continues to promote enterprise data protection with advanced CDP. I wrote 10 years ago a short blog post about them (blog post in French July 2006) and also in 2010 as the product was clearly oriented in the CDP direction at that time (blog post in French May 2010).
The company, founded in France in 2002 by former Quadratec leaders, well known for Time Navigator, has shipped so far 15000+ appliances via a pure 100% channel model.

Synerway Enterprise CDP is a block based solution that captures in real-time data changes and ships them to a disk attached to a dedicated appliance. An agent must be installed to make this capture and of course, a first copy is needed that serves as a reference. The granularity is excellent as the capture can work from 512 bytes which is also a key optimization feature different from competitions who capture data from 1kB to 128kB. The product can manage up to 1000 snapshots, so 1000 versions possible, largely enough to control all data critical environments. There is no catalog and the agent fee is capacity based without any limits on the number of instances deployed. In the Windows environment, the agent is compatible with VSS. On the target, the product controls data and storage with thin provisioning, compression and encryption. There is a stress point as Synerway must develop, validate and follow various OSes with long matrices. Synerway also offered FileSafe and DiskSafe, 2 options from FalconStor.
It exists 3 approaches - In-Band, Out-of-Band and Side-Band - and this approach reminds me 2 Side-Band approach blog posts I wrote in Dec. 2005 (2 posts in French available here and here). In the classic Side-Band mode, it is used without any intrusive agent with just a logical volume manager and a dedicated path with an appliance that stores and versions data. For people who work in this industry for more than 10 years, this approach seems similar to what Revivio did, then the company got acquired by Symantec and offered the feature via NetBackup RealTime. You can check also a pretty blog post I made in January 2006, still in French.
Synerway seems to position Enterprise CDP in front of DeDuplication but these 2 technologies are more extension and not alternatives. Even with Compression on the Synerway side, users can perfectly use DeDup in target mode coupled with CDP. CDP targets RPO - Recovery Point Objectives - needs and its mission it's not to reduce storage space and DeDup is chosen for the storage capacity economy it can generate, or capability to use low network bandwidth for remote backup for instance. However, Synerway has a pretty interesting approach to both satisfy RPO requirements and storage space and their success proves that the solution has a real value.