Microsoft wants to be the top platform for disaster recovery, so it's buying InMage

Disaster recovery ain’t the sexiest area of computing. But companies don’t hesitate to throw cash at technology that can save the day in an emergency, and Microsoft wants to get in on that.

So Microsoft has bought a company called InMage, which Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise marketing, described in a blog post today as “an innovator in the emerging area of cloud-based business continuity.”

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From a corporate perspective, one could sort of mash it under Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella’s dictum yesterday that “at our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”

Microsoft has lately become more willing to serve as a platform that can accept workloads from all over the place, not just Microsoft-centric applications. Microsoft has previously added support for Linux operating systems in Azure. And the other day Microsoft came out as a backer of the Google-initiated open-source Linux container manager Kubernetes.

“Microsoft will help contribute code to Kubernetes to enable customers to easily manage containers that can run anywhere. This will make it easier to build multi-cloud solutions including targeting Microsoft Azure” Microsoft cloud chief Scott Guthrie said in a canned statement about the news.

The InMage deal drives Microsoft down a related path. The deal will help Microsoft support lots of environments, including “Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware, or others,” Numoto wrote in today’s blog post.

The deal targets VMware in particular. VMware last year launched its vCloud Hybrid Service and added a disaster-recovery option there.

“As VMware customers explore their options to permanently migrate their applications to the cloud, this will also provide a great onramp,” Numoto wrote.

InMage is now integrating its technology into the Azure Site Recovery Service, according to a statement on the InMage site.

InMage started in 2002 and was based in San Jose, Calif. For years it sold Scout software that could back up or replicate data and enable recovery. Last year it started selling InMage-4000 hardware that let companies “restart datacenters in minutes with near zero data loss” and move data to clouds. They can work with Microsoft, Linux, and Unix operating systems.

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InMage investors include Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Kumar Malavalli, the company’s chief executive. It announced a $15 million round in 2008 and a $10 million round in 2007.

Strategic partners include HP, Intel Microsoft, Red Hat, Sungard, and VMware.