About R1Soft
I’m David Wartell, CEO founder of Righteous Software Inc. The ideas behind Righteous Software began in the 1997. At the time, I was a computer engineering student at Michigan State University. I liked to keep busy so while going to school I operated my own company called ActionWeb Services.
ActionWeb Services an early web-based software pioneer, developed web applications for small and medium sized enterprises. My company quickly grew into a regional leader in custom web applications.
In addition to developing software, AWS also sold web servers and web hosting. When AWS started it had a single Sun Unix server and a 4 GB DDS tape drive. Seemingly overnight this single server operation grew into a small farm of Linux servers. We quickly outgrew our tape drive and I was faced with the problem of not having a way to back up my customers and their data.
ActionWeb co-founder Steve LeBel and I sat around one day lamenting about the tape drive system we needed to get. Steve suggested that it seemed ridiculous we should spend so much money on a tape system when much larger hard disks are comparatively inexpensive. At first I laughed at the idea. After giving it some more thought, later that night I decided I would build a system that would back up our network of servers to a single host and store all of the data on disk.
First I checked for commercial software. At the time no one had ever heard of disk-based backups. Not finding any answers I pieced together a solution using shell scripts and open source network file copy software. We backed up all of our servers to a single PC with some large hard disks. It was crude, and I was the only one that knew how to run it, but it worked. Fortunately our data set was fairly small so it didn’t slow our servers down too bad. We continued to grow our company and never gave much more thought to our backup system.
A few years later we sold the company. In 2003 I decided I needed to start a new business.
Still intrigued with the idea of disk-based backups I decided I would develop software that solved this problem once and for all. I wanted something that was better than any existing backup solution, yet still affordable enough that everyone could use it.
Some entrepreneurs in Texas were doing their own brand of innovation. In 2000, a company then called Rackshack invented the $99 dedicated web server. Web servers were no longer limited to the rich and elite, now everyone could afford their own server. An entire industry exploded around them and its no longer just small businesses. Larger and larger companies are taking advantage of this cost competitive model for Internet servers.
There is just one problem with all of this… all these servers need a backup solution!
I learned there were thousands of people in the same situation I was in years earlier. They need backups but don’t have any solid solution. Being the very clever people that they are, they quickly figured out they could get second hard drives in their servers, or copy files between servers. Service providers like Rackshack started selling storage space on ftp servers to accommodate this.
An entire industry, data centers full of tens-of-thousands of servers, all have nothing more than homegrown shell scripts and ftp to backup their data.
Righteous Software is changing all of this. Our innovative disk-based backup product for Linux delivers nearly-continuous data protection, open file backups, bare-metal disaster recovery, and an easy-to-use web interface, all at a price everyone can afford.
David Wartell
CEO and Founder,
Righteous Software Inc.
