According to users and industry experts, the features and support Zmanda has added to the package could be appealing to highly cost-conscious but less technically advanced users at the low end of the market. These users are currently caught between writing their own shell scripts and using freeware or enterprise-level backup software they can't afford to buy or manage.

The Zmanda Network with Amanda Enterprise Edition software is based on the Amanda standard developed at the University of Maryland over a decade ago. Zmanda has developed it from its original incarnation to support Windows machines, added security features, brought it up to date with support for new applications, improved its scalability and added a management GUI.

Some users are already using a straight-up version of Amanda, but in a way are also using Zmanda's product, as "just about every developer who has really worked on this standard in the last few years has done it through us," according to Zmanda's CEO, Chander Kant. For example, Zmanda has addressed some of the scalability issues in the original Amanda specification, one of which was that it did not allow a single backup to span multiple tapes. Shops using older Amanda versions had to run separate different configuration scripts for each individual tape.

The company's newest product, however, is expected to bring open source backup software into a wider marketplace -- a marketplace that, according to backup expert Curtis Preston, senior analyst with GlassHouse Technologies Inc., has been underserved.

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