French storage vendor Atempo Inc. plans to go head to head against players such as Computer Associates, CommVault Systems, EMC, and Veritas in the data-backup and recovery market. Atempo, which already has thousands of named accounts overseas, touts as one of its advantages the ability to back up information at the file level, making it easier to recover. Most other vendors still conduct data protection at lower levels.

Atempo will unveil the Royal Meteorological Society, known as the Met Office in the United Kingdom, as its customer next week. At The Met, Time Navigator, the Atempo file-backup and -recovery product, resides on an NEC TX7 file server, backing up information from two supercomputers that can hold as much as 36 terabytes of data at one time. Around 20 terabytes of files per week are backed up to four Storage Technology Corp. PowderHorn tape libraries.

Says Steve Duplessie, founder and analyst at IT market research firm The Enterprise Strategy Group, "Companies [now] need a PhD to make other backup and recovery products work, and 8th-grade science is all they'll need for Time Navigator."