DataGardens

DataGardens, founded in 2007 by Dr. Geoff Hayward in Edmonton, Canada, established itself as a specialized provider of disaster recovery software systems. Dr. Hayward identified a critical need for businesses to move virtual computers and their associated data not just within a single data center but across the globe in response to business requirements. This vision was aimed at overcoming the challenges of network bandwidth and the inherent delays caused by the speed of light in long-distance data transfer.

The company's core offering revolved around a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) model, which provided an affordable and less complex solution for small to midsize businesses and enterprise departments that required high uptime. Its flagship software suite, SafeHaven, enabled customers to mirror physical or virtual machine data to a highly available cloud environment. This created an offsite virtual data center, allowing clients to define specific recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. A key feature of SafeHaven was its point-and-click functionality for failover and failback testing, which could be performed without disrupting live production systems. The business model focused on delivering these infrastructure services as a service rather than a standalone product, leveraging various cloud technologies to do so.

After shifting its business focus in 2012 to concentrate purely on disaster recovery, DataGardens experienced rapid growth. This trajectory culminated in its acquisition by CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies) on December 8, 2014. The acquisition was a strategic move for CenturyLink to integrate a proven disaster recovery offering into its cloud portfolio, building on a pre-existing partnership between the two companies. Prior to the acquisition, DataGardens had raised $2.4 million in funding, with Verdex Capital as an investor, and had grown to a team of 15 employees.

Keywords: disaster recovery, DRaaS, cloud backup, business continuity, data protection, virtual machine replication, SafeHaven, cloud failover, recovery point objective, RPO, recovery time objective, RTO, infrastructure as a service, IaaS, data center migration, CenturyLink, Lumen Technologies, virtual data center, high availability, data mirroring