Commvault acquires Appranix for recovery automation
Appranix, Commvault's third acquisition, provides automated recovery services for cloud applications including configuration data and dependencies to reduce enterprise downtime.
Data backup vendor Commvault Systems has acquired Appranix, which specializes in recovering configuration data for cloud applications and network connectivity.
The Appranix platform discovers and maps configurations and data dependencies, such as user access permissions or network connections, and can create immutable vaults of configuration and application data on a separate hyperscaler to be used for automated recovery. This technology will be added to the Commvault Cloud platform in the coming months, according to Commvault. In the meantime, Appranix's services will remain available for sale and supported.
A Commvault spokesperson said the acquisition "would not be material to their financials," but declined to provide specifics. Appranix's 50 employees, including CEO Govind Rangasamy, will join Commvault. Appranix is headquartered in Boston, but most of the team is based in India. Commvault plans to open an office in Coimbatore, India, to support these employees.
Data protection and recovery is difficult for enterprises, said Krista Macomber, an analyst at Futurum Group. In the aftermath of an outage, IT teams have to reconnect resources to applications, where business-critical user permissions and other intricate setup steps can drag out a recovery time, she said. Automating parts of that process within a backup offering should help curb those headaches.
"Getting your entire application stack up and running [after an outage] is a laborious and complex process," Macomber said. "If this can become an extension of tools already in use, this could make life easier for IT operations."
Supporting a network of data needs
Commvault has made two prior acquisitions to fill out its technology portfolio in recent years. These included software-defined storage company Hedvig in 2019, and TrapX, a security company specializing in decoy technology, in 2022.
Appranix, founded in 2016 and still private, sells its Cloud Resilience Copilot platform as a service and supports AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Commvault already offers immutable, air-gapped data backup capabilities to disconnect backups from physical or network connections. Immutability establishes a clean copy of data files, but still requires the customer to manually reconnect the data to the applications and reestablish connectivity with other services.
It makes sense to have a technology like this folded into a broad set of data management tools.
Krista MacomberAnalyst, Futurum Group
Appranix can help with manual reconnection, which has become even more complex in recent years with the rise of containerized applications and orchestration services such as Kubernetes, Macomber said. Container applications connect to many different services, and those connections could have been established by development teams, making them invisible to IT, she said.
"It makes sense to have a technology like this folded into a broad set of data management tools," she said.
Commvault has Kubernetes data backup and recovery services, but Appranix adds new capabilities such as configuration maps and cluster services, said Tim Zonca, vice president of portfolio marketing at Commvault, in an emailed statement to TechTarget Editorial.
"It's the rebuild component that Appranix brings that continues to elevate Commvault's cyber-resilience set of offerings," he said.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.
