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I’m David Wartell, founder of R1Soft. The ideas behind R1Soft and CDP began in 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 web hosting company.

When I started I had a single Sun Unix server and a 4 GB DDS tape drive. Seemingly overnight this single server operation grew into a 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.

I sat around one day lamenting about the expensive tape robot system we needed to get. My colleague 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 the only option was VTL (Virtual Tape Library). To me that seemed like a ridiculous and expensive hack, trick tape backup software into writing to disk. Not finding any other options I pieced together a solution using shell scripts and rsync. 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 and provided daily backups to disk.

As my hosting business and data set grew I noticed that my nightly backup process with rsync was a real problem. On my largest server it some times couldn't finish the backup before morning and it wasn't unusual to have slow web server responses during the backup process.

I wanted a backup solution that was highly efficient. Able to take a backup in minutes even on a large data set. Why should backup software scan all the data for hours only to copy a small set of changes? There had to be a better way. I wanted something easy to use that could be installed on any Windows or Linux server without special hardware.

I tried CA ArcServeIT, Veritas BackupExec, IBM Tivoli, and Legato.  Some of them wouldn't even work correctly on some of my Linux distributions and the software packages that did seemed to provide no performance advantage over my home brew rsync system. Why pay for all this expensive commercial software if it can't solve my real problem of backups taking too long and killing my disk I/O?

So I looked further and learned that if I used a SAN I might be able to offload the backup I/O from my primary storage. That sounded good until I investigated the cost of converting my servers from direct storage to a SAN! This is madness I thought. There must be a better way, all I want is backups.

I learned there were thousands of people and millions of servers in the same situation I was in years earlier. Everyone was struggling with expensive commercial backup software that ultimately worked no better than a simple rsync, or file copy.  Servers were only getting backed up once a day and the process was awful and disk I/O intensive.  Sure there are SAN backups and replication, all a bit like throwing hundreds of thousands in hardware at a problem that should be simply solved with software.

R1Soft is changing all of this. Our innovative CDP software for Windows and Linux delivers 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
V.P. and Founder R1Soft Division,
BBS Technologies, Inc.