When a startup has a good idea, venture capitalists line up like fans at a Stanley Cup final (go Bruins!).
CloudByte must be onto something as Fidelity Growth Partners recently seeded the cloud company with an extra $4 million. The previous round rained down $2.1 on the company. The high-flying CloudByte plans to spend some of the dough on new employees, and will focus on the three legs of the startup stool – product development, sales and marketing.
This year the young CloudByte launched its major technology in the form of ElastiStor, something investor and new board member Raul Rai is impressed with.
“ElastiStor storage technology, shipping since January, and its applicability for both cloud storage providers and enterprise private clouds helped us make this investment decision. As part of our diligence, we also observed that CloudByte has achieved greater traction than companies that have raised much larger rounds of funding,” Rai revealed.
You’ve probably heard of Software Defined Networking (SDN). Well, CloudByte does software-defined storage, and its approach lets it literally guarantee the quality of service (QoS) for all the software that shares its storage system, and at the same time offer on-demand performance management.
Another investor, Sandeep Singhal, from Nexus Venture, thinks this technology will drive the industry forward.
“The storage industry is experiencing a fundamental shift to a software-based model, giving both cloud service providers and enterprises the flexibility and scale they need without compromising performance and other high-end features. CloudByte's patented storage QoS solution gives its customers the ability to deliver scalable on-demand performance from commodity storage components, both HDDs and SSDs, for a range of application needs,” Singhal said.
CloudByte this June hired SanDisk veteran Greg Goelz as its new CEO. After far less than a month, Goelz is already gulping the CloudByte Kool-Aid.
“While the all-flash discussion continues, our software approach allows organizations to optimize their infrastructure based on their requirements and select their preferred storage components; today, most customers are just beginning to deploy SSDs and economics is a key factor in driving their storage solutions,” Goelz explained. “We enable our customers to start with the mix that is right for their business and continue to use CloudByte to manage their storage as their business grows and needs change.”
While storage virtualization has existed for well over a decade, CloudByte claims to lift this technology even higher.
“Our vision is to build the next-generation storage technology that enables intelligent, grid-like, and software-defined storage, making it dramatically easier to afford and manage storage for thousands of applications in today’s virtualized datacenter,” the company explained. “CloudByte has been architected from the ground-up to handle the new-age datacenters’ demands. We redefine storage beyond capacity in terms of throughput, latency, and IOPS. Together with linear scaling, this enables a single extensible storage platform compared to fragmented storage with legacy solutions. From this storage platform, it is now incredibly easy to provision on-demand storage and manage it for thousands of applications in your datacenter.”
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
