Founded in 2019 in Poitiers, France, with a recent seed round of €600k, the team has designed a P2P backup solution that leverages research work made by its CTO, Olivier Dalle, during his tenure at CNRS at University of Nice Côte d'Azur.
The main idea is to adopt a decentralized architecture with a network of consumers and producers. All participating systems are both a consumer, a source machine generating data, and a producer, a target machine that stores data coming from consumers.
This model means no centralization of data via a server, on a backup device on one site.
Inspeere sells a service represented by a server to be deployed at the source site, where data are produced. This system, named Datis box, is then configured to belong to a P2P network and therefore participate to the global protection. One of the key elements that makes robust this solution is the choice of ZFS disk file system with its open source flavor. And it means that several ZFS functions are available like compression, snapshot and replication beyond a strong data integrity.
The data workflow and process is simple and straightforward. The first step is the local backup made by any tool or even a dedicated backup product. This backup image is then made consistent with a local snapshot that is compressed and then encrypted. At that moment, everything is ready to escape the source machine. Before sending data to other participating machines, an erasure coding (EC) schema based on Reed Solomon is applied to the data and each fragment, data and parity, is sent to ZFS targets with ZFS replication. The EC mode theoretically considers 48 targets, in details 36+12, 36 data chunks plus 12 parity chunks. In practice, it appears that 4+2 or 6+2 models are largely enough with very resilient Datis boxes, up and running all the time with very low failure rates or downtime. Beyond data oriented tasks, network optimization has been made with intelligent bandwidth allocation, named DataSmooth, and advanced load balancing call Savvy. At the end, all backup images are stored locally on each source machines and also dispersed on peer machine.
Inspeere reminds me my project KerStor launched in 2009 at the time we were only a few pioneers like Aetherstore, Wuala, UbiStorage or Symform and a few others. Globally this segment I follow deeply has counted more than 20 players and solutions.
The Inspeere solution is GDPR and NIS2 compliant of course, key in Europe, and obviously a must for a French company. The nature of the solution impacts positively the ESG and green model as secondary storage purchase is delayed or even avoided.
In our current time with high pressure of cyber threats, this dispersed encrypted data fragments approach makes the penetration of the system and the modification of data almost impossible. Now the go-to-market is here very critical as the classic partners can't be really touched considering the secondary storage purchase avoidance. But a new partner ecosystem is needed to address remote and branch offices, distributed businesses like real estate network, franchise business, regional entities with law firms...
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