Industry data backup Founders Tom Gelson, Alex Stoev | Founded 2007 Number of locations 3 | |
Type Angel-backed private company Headquarters Middleboro, Massachusetts, U.S. | ||
Nine Technology is an online backup software developer for Windows personal computers and servers. The cloud-based products allow resellers to offer online backup and recovery services to their clients with near-continuous, scheduled, or manual updates. Nine Technology pioneered use of Imation-branded RDX portable hard drives to implement cloud backup services without requiring an initial over-the-wire backup.
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History
Nine Technology began as a subsidiary of Vault USA, an online backup managed service provider. Dissatisfied with existing software, Nine Technology’s executives began developing an entirely new system in 2006. Upon completion of the Powered By Nine product, Nine Technology sold the managed service business and began selling its own software.
In December 2011, the technology that governs the Powered By Nine software was awarded a U.S. patent for its combination of block-level deduplication and encryption.
Following the issuing of the patent, the technology and certain other assets were sold to Imation. Nine Technology continues to offer backup services as a partner of Imation and a stand-alone channel enabler.
Headquartered in Middleboro, Massachusetts, Nine Technology currently employs 25 people and has offices in Middleboro, Guangzhou, China, and Toronto, Ontario.
In December, 2011 they were acquired by Imation. In July, 2012, NineTechnology sent out emails to all of their partners that they would be discontinuing all service on August 15. Accounts would not stay active, or be switched over to Imation.
Products
As of December 2011, Nine Technology has three products
Products including local storage appliances and support for Apple and Linux operating systems are expected by the end of 2011.
Technology
Nine Technology was awarded a patent in December 2011 for its two-stage block-level global deduplication process, which dramatically reduces the storage space required in the infrastructure to maintain customer data. The process also reduces the amount of bandwidth required for a customer to update their files in the cloud. Following an initial “full” backup, customers using a Nine Technology product only send “incremental”, or changed data to the cloud.
The server architecture required to operate a Powered By Nine solution is a R.A.I.N. (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes) organization. This data storage approach allows the system to expand should demand for space exceed space available. Adding load balancers to the system also makes backup and restore processes faster as the vault expands.
In October 2010, Nine Technology and Imation announced a partnership that established Imation’s RDX portable hard drives as the preferred “cloud-seeding” device of Nine Technology. This means that businesses that subscribe to the PRO service can launch their cloud storage solution by shipping RDX drives with their data to the Nine Technology data center.