Start-Up Profile: Load DynamiX

Company
Load DynamiX, Inc. (formerly SwiftTest until late 2013)
 
Location
HQs in San Jose, CA, with sales and support personnel in six locations in the US, recently opened first European office in London, UK
 
Date founded
Late 2008
 
Financial funding
Load DynamiX has had three formal rounds of funding. Initial funding was provided by Benhamou Global Ventures and Floodgate Capital. The second round of $7.5 million included new investors Azure Capital Partners and Kinetic Ventures. The third round of $12.5 million was led by new investor, HighBar Partners in May 2014. Overall, the company has raised just under $25 million.
 
Revenues and profitability
Sales under $50 million, grew sales by 350% in 2014 (number 5 in our ranking on the Most Growing Storage Companies in 2014 From 2013, not yet profitable
 
Main executives
Load DynamiX was founded by Clay Marr, Richard Bush and Leonard Sheiba. They all worked in the network performance testing space for companies such as Ixia and Spirent. They wanted their load testing expertise to address the problems associated with networked storage performance testing.
 

Key executives include:

CEO Philippe Vincent, who joined in 2011 and, before that, held executive positions at IBM, BigFix, and Accenture, beginning his career with engineering positions at Alcatel and PSA Peugeot Citroën

• CTO Leonard Sheiba formerly CEO and founder of 3Play Networks, founder of the VoIP pioneer, ThinkingVOICE Networks, and earlier in his career, held positions at Octane and Carl Zeiss/Alergan
• VP marketing Len Rosenthal, who held executive and senior positions at Virtual Instruments, Panasas, QLogic, SGI and HP
• VP of products Tim Van Ash, from CA Technologies, Nimsoft, HP and Mercury Interactive
• VP WW sales Warren Bell, from Cenzic, Visionael, CenterRun, Remedy, and Digital Equipment
   

Number of employees
80

Technology

IT end-users deploy Load DynamiX in their pre-production test labs for five use cases to answer the following questions:

• Technology selection: what are the benefits of new technologies such as flash, hybrids, SDS, OpenStack, CEPH, FCoE, etc.?
• Product evaluation: which storage product and vendor is best for my specific production workloads?
  Configuration optimization: what is the best mix of HDDs and SSDs? What is the optimal tiering or caching strategy?
• Pre-production staging and validation: will my newly-deployed infrastructure perform as expected before I cut over to live production?
• Change validation: will new software and firmware updates from my chosen vendors degrade performance before I deploy into production? 

The IP in Load DynamiX is focused around workload modeling, workload analytics, and purpose-built load generation appliances that help storage engineers and architects optimize the performance, scalability, and cost of their storage infrastructures. Company’s appliances can generate realistic workloads with an accuracy of over 97%, based on data derived from production I/O profiles, across any block, file or object storage system. The appliances can generate massive loads that can find the breaking point of any networked storage system as it relates to a specific customer’s workloads.

The solution enables accurate emulation of production application workloads at extreme scale to find the limits and optimal configurations of storage system before these are selected and deployed in production. The solution is also used to validate all storage infrastructure changes.

• The storage performance validation platform allows storage array vendors to:
• Unify storage validation processes with a single testing product for file, block, and object/cloud storage
• Emulate real-world traffic to get accurate and efficient workload simulation with deep storage protocol emulations
• Validate storage systems quickly with an intuitive set-up and a library of pre-built tests

Different appliance configurations appropriate for IT organizations

Released date  
The Load DynamiX appliance was initially released in 2009. The current version 4.0 was announced in June 2015.
 
Price range  
Storage performance validation solutions range from $50,000 to $250,000, including the first year of support and, typically, three-day QuickStart services
 
Roadmap  
Today supporting 10GbE and 16Gb FC ports to generate load and, in the future, plan to support 40GbE and 32Gb FC. Also working on improving the simplicity of the workload acquisition and workload modeling.
 
Partners
Major storage vendors, including Dell, EMC, HP, Oracle, and IBM, and lot of privately-held storage vendors like Pure Storage and Violin Memory
 
Distributors and OEMs
Less than 20 resellers in USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, India, China, and South Korea, EMC having the rights to resell the products globally
 
Customers
First product was shipped in mid-2009 to EMC, firm’s first customer. The others are split between storage-related vendors and large IT organizations. In 2013, nearly 90% of sales were to storage vendors, but in 2015, the company expects that split to be very close to 50/50. Storage technology customers include EMC, Cisco, Cleversafe, Dell, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Nexenta, Oracle, Pure Storage, Scality, Tegile and Violin Memory. IT end-users include ADP, AT&T, Cox Communications, Firehost, General Electric, GoDaddy, IBM Softlayer, NTT, PayPal, Shutterfly, T-Mobile, United Healthcare and Wells Fargo Bank. Appliances are installed at over 100 sites across the globe.
 
Competitors
Users who do perform storage performance testing today often use freeware load testing tools such as Iometer, FIO or vdbench, but these tools do not offer the realism, scale, features, repeatability, and ease-of-use of Load DynamiX. Also competitors include Aptare, San Sentinel and Virtual Instruments.