2/ Cloudistics in Storage Acceleration

Start-up Cloudistics, Inc. was founded in 2013 in Reston, VA by a team of software guys coming mainly from AppAssure Software, in backup and DR software for Windows applications, and sold to Dell in February 2012.

Its flagship product, ION, is a storage acceleration appliance supposed to double application density and accelerate application performance on existing infrastructure in minutes.

In a Form D published this year by SEC, the private company offered $1 million and sold only $717,016 to finance its business. In this document is written that previous names of Cloudistics were NSI Software, Inc. and Adaptiveapps, Inc.

Main executives:

Najaf Husain, CEO, is a technology entrepreneur and investor with over 25 years of experience building companies and managing capital investments in the infrastructure software market. Previously, he was CEO of AppAssure, which he co-founded in 2006. In total, the company amassed over 6,500 enterprise customers. Prior to AppAssure, he served as a consultant with Bain Capital Ventures and co-invested in many companies, including Solarwinds, Network Intelligence, Dynatrace, AppNeta, and SevOne. Earlier in his career, he was founder and CEO of WQuinn Associates, acquired by Precise Software and subsequently acquired by Veritas Software in 2003.
Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, CTO, was VP and GM of Dell data protection division. He has over 15 years of experience in architecting and building advanced high-performance computing environments, scalable file systems, and storage subsystems in startup companies and academia. Prior to Dell, he was one of the co-founders and the CTO of AppAssure, the director of the Center for High-End Computing Systems, and an associate professor of computer science at Virginia Tech.
Todd Fredrick, CRO, was also one of the co-founders of AppAssure where grew the revenue from zero to $25 million in four years. He has also held executive positions at Dell, Symantec, Veritas, Precise, and WQuinn.

Among the advisors of the start-up there are Bill Veghte, EVP and GM of HP enterprise group as well as Ben Nye, CEO of VMTurbo, who was SVP at Veritas Software following its acquisition of Precise Software, where he served as COO and CFO.

The ION Storage Acceleration Appliance is installed between any hypervisor and SAN array to see application acceleration, by 20X – according to the company -, without software installations or data migrations.

With Intelligent Flash, ION’s software intelligently uses real-time analytics to understand I/O patterns. Write-back technology accelerates writes by 100x over traditional SAN arrays. ION also uses write-through technology to identify read hotspots and accelerate reads over 300x.

ION spans multiple storage arrays through a simple LUN configuration, allowing to accelerate all applications with a single appliance.

It provides high availability for every component of the appliance, including dual controllers and mirrored flash disks.

There are three offerings with up to 8TB of write-cache capacity for $.65/GB: