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Sepaton

Cybersecurity · Marlborough, United States · Founded 1999

Sepaton, Inc. operated as a provider of enterprise data protection solutions, specializing in hardware and software products designed for large-scale data backup and recovery. The company was originally founded as SANgate Systems, Inc. in 1999 and rebranded to Sepaton in 2003. One of its founders, Dr. Alex Winokur, brought a rich systems engineering background and a proven record in developing high-performance storage subsystems to the venture. The firm was established to address the growing data protection needs of large enterprises and government organizations. The company's business was centered on manufacturing and selling purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA). Its target clients were enterprise-level IT organizations, particularly those in sectors like financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications, managing massive and rapidly growing data volumes. Sepaton's revenue model was based on the sale of these hardware appliances and the associated software licenses. A significant milestone for the company was its acquisition by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) in August 2014, after which it operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary. This acquisition was part of HDS's broader strategy to enhance its data protection portfolio. Prior to the acquisition, Sepaton had raised approximately $61 million in funding from various investors, including HarbourVest Partners and Menlo Ventures. Sepaton's flagship product line was its S2100 series, which featured the patented DeltaScale architecture. This scale-out grid architecture was designed to deliver high, deterministic backup and restore speeds, capable of handling up to 80TB per hour. A key feature was its data deduplication technology, which could significantly reduce the physical storage footprint, for instance by fitting up to 25TB of data into just 1TB of storage. The appliances were engineered to work with leading backup software applications and offered features like automated load-balancing and remote management, which were particularly beneficial for enterprises with multiple remote offices. The system was also noted for its ability to handle various data types and workloads by applying different deduplication methods, such as inline and post-process, to optimize performance and capacity savings. Keywords: Sepaton, data protection, purpose-built backup appliance, PBBA, enterprise backup, data recovery, Hitachi Data Systems, HDS, SANgate Systems, data deduplication, scale-out architecture, DeltaScale, enterprise storage, backup and recovery, virtual tape library, VTL, data protection platform, Alex Winokur, network management software