Carbonite recently announced the completion of our Series C financing and a major deal with Lenovo. These two announcements generated some great press. But, there are two articles in particular that I wanted to share with you.

In an article that appeared in Mass High Tech, Christopher Calnan reported:

“

Online backup provider Carbonite Inc. recently closed its second bundling deal with a major personal computer manufacturer and followed that up last week by closing a Series C round of financing.

Boston-based Carbonite closed an agreement to provide free four-month online backup service subscriptions for the Ideapad line of desktop and laptop computers made by Hong Kong-based Lenovo Group Ltd., CEO David Friend said.

In June, Carbonite reached a similar agreement with Netherlands-based Packard Bell BV for the PC maker to bundle subscriptions for purchasers of Packard Bell desktop and notepad computers in Europe. Lenovo officials declined to confirm the deal with Carbonite.

Although Friend would not disclose the specifics of the Series C financing, he expects it to be enough to fuel Carbonite before it completes an initial public offering.

"That's the next step," Friend said. "The projections show that it will be the last cash we'll need. (Carbonite is) the type of company that should go public."

Shortly after, Xconomy reporter, Wade Roush published an article entitled "Carbonite Puts Its Online Backup Software on Lenovo Computers, Raises $20 Million" in which he notes:

“

Last Wednesday, the Mozy division of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced that its software will power an online backup service available to buyers of Thinkpad SL notebook computers, the newest line of business laptops from Lenovo. Not to be outdone, Boston-based Carbonite is expected to announce soon that it has formed an even broader partnership with the Chinese computer maker: All Lenovo IdeaPad and IdeaCentre computers—the company’s lines of home and home-office laptops and desktops, respectively—will now come with Carbonite's online backup software pre-installed.

At the same time, Carbonite is about to announce formally that it has closed a $20 million financing round, the third since the company's founding in 2005. (It raised $2.5 million in Series A funding in February, 2006, and completed a $15 million Series B round in May, 2007.)

Both of these articles attest to the fact that online backup is becoming mainstream. At some point in the future, we hope online backup is as common, and as top-of-mind, as anti-virus software is today.

— Alison

Several people have asked me to post a description of our infrastructure. As I mentioned in my previous post about HP’s infrastructure difficulties, "HP Upline and the challenge of large scale backup," keeping billions of files safe is no small task.

The first thing you should know about our architecture is that we never handle unencrypted data. Carbonite encrypts all files before they leave your PC. We use 448-bit Blowfish encryption. I’ve been told that Blowfish has never been cracked. It is the strongest commercial encryption on the market.

Carbonite employs the most sophisticated firewalls and intrusion detection systems available. We pay a professional hacker firm to attack the data center constantly, looking for security holes. I think our defenses are as good as most banks. Heise Security recently wrote about how they hacked into many of our competitors’ backup systems but were unable to hack into Carbonite Their so-called “Man-In-The-Middle” test attack is something we designed against from the beginning. Frankly, I was amazed that most of the other vendors were so easily hacked by these guys and backed up files either compromised or deleted.

At our secure data center, your data is stored on arrays of 1-terabyte enterprise-grade drives. Carbonite uses RAID-6 redundant arrays which spread copies of the data across multiple hard drives. Each array has 16 drives. Three of the 16 would have to fail simultaneously and the user’s PC would have to crash at the same time before any data would be lost. These RAID-6 arrays are 36,000,000 times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. We have redundant power, redundant Internet connections, redundant Web servers and so forth. The data center is guarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week; and admission is controlled by fingerprint ID locks.

As you can imagine, we use a lot of bandwidth. We currently back up over 40 million new files every day and we have over 7 billion already backed up. Given the amount of bandwidth we use, it’s best to be located in a major telecoms center where multiple carriers converge. Therefore, we chose to build our data center in one of those so-called “bomb-proof” buildings with all the major Boston financial institutions and telcos.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Dave recently appeared on Fox Business News. In case you didn't have a chance to see it, you can stream it here on Fox Business News. Enjoy!

— Alison

Hi Everyone,

We're so excited that the Carbonite blog is up and running. There's been some great coverage on Carbonite recently and, for any of you that are interested, I thought I'd post the links here.

USA Today: Carbonite gets personal about backing up PC files

USA Today: Talking Tech Spotlight Video

Bootcamp Technology Show on Bloomberg Radio: Listen to an interview with David Friend

Spokesman Review: When hard drives fail: My experience shows you need to have a plan

I'll try to keep you posted as more coverage comes in.

Thanks!

— Alison

I’m David Friend, Carbonite’s co-founder and CEO. I’ve been asked to launch our new blog with a few words about the company, how we got started and what we are trying to achieve. I’m looking forward to being an active participant on this blog and hope you will take the time to do the same.

Jeff Flowers and I founded Carbonite in 2005. We got the idea because Jeff’s wife had her laptop stolen (it wasn’t backed up) and my daughter had a hard drive crash (she lost half a semester’s work). We couldn’t find a good solution for them, so we decided to build one ourselves.

In general, our design philosophy is “simple is better.” We prefer products like the iPod over things with tons of features but are hard to use. The problem we’re trying to solve with Carbonite is a simple one: any day we could lose everything on our computers. And we think this problem demands a simple solution. That’s why we created the first unlimited pricing plan in the backup industry – you don’t have to make any choices, and you never outgrow it. That’s why we made our backup continuous – most people want to backup as they go and not have to worry about leaving their computer on all night for some old-fashioned batch job to run. And most people want to know that their data is really safe, so we use the strongest commercial encryption available and we store our customers’ data on redundant disk arrays that are 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. Our idea of a great product advance is figuring out how to eliminate an unnecessary feature (which adds needless complexity) by making it automatic so you don’t have to think about it.

Are we perfect? No. We have a long list of great ideas for ways to improve the service and we’re implementing them with each new release. Most of these ideas we get from our users (even more of an incentive for you to leave comments). Mostly we want things to be simpler, cleaner, more self-explanatory. Nobody we know really wants to “use” a backup system – they just want their data to be completely safe. So the easier the better.

In future blog posts, I’ll tell you about some of our challenges. Meanwhile, I’d like to hear from you: do you have thoughts or questions about the product, our service (I know, sometimes you have to wait to talk to a customer support rep – we’re working on it), or the people who make up our company?

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite