2008 isn't turning out to be a good year for continuous data protection vendors. Mendocino Software closed it's doors, Double-Take Software snapped up TimeSpring for a nice bag of shiny beads and a few ax handles, and now IBM is buying FilesX for what Israeli business news site Globes reports to be $70 million to $90 million dollars. That would be a pretty good exit, as the VCs that funded FilesX only put in around $20 million. FilesX will be a good server complement to IBM's Tivoli CDP for Files, which is really only useful for laptops and workstations.

FilesX had a pretty nice product for Windows servers and was the only CDP vendor to have a serious bare-metal restore feature that supported restore to dissimilar hardware.

With the demise of FilesX, it seems the days of the standalone CDP vendor have about come to a close. Users looking for CDP functionality should look to combined CDP/backup, CDP/replication, or CDP/storage virtualization solutions. Frankly,that may be an improvement.

This blog was updated April 15.