Start-Up's Profile: Maginatics

HQs:
Mountain View, CA

Date founded:
July 2010

Financial funding:

Series A: $10 million from VMware and Atlantic Bridge
Series B: $17 million in 2013 from Intel Capital, Comcast Ventures, WestSummit Capital and former investors

Main executives:

Amarjit Gill, co-founder and CEO: was formerly co-founder and VP of business development and sales at SiByte (acquired by Broadcom), co-founder and EVP of business development and sales at PA Semi (acquired by Apple), and co-founder and CEO of Agnilux (acquired by Google).
Jay Kistler, co-founder and CTO: previous roles included VP of engineering at Yahoo!, where he led the search and advertising infrastructure programs; VP of engineering at Promptu (originally known as AgileTV); and chief architect for platform technologies at Akamai.
Niraj Tolia, VP of engineering: was previously senior researcher in the Exascale Computing Lab at HP Labs.
Kevin O’Keefe, VP sales: served as CEO, COO and sales leader at numerous technology companies; has also participated in several exits including IPOs at Stratus Computer and Envivio as well as trade sales with Diogenes sold to Trizetto, NativeMinds sold to Verity, and MindShare sold to Digital Impact.
Kavitha Mariappan, VP marketing: formerly was the head of marketing for the Stingray application delivery product line at Riverbed after holding held a variety of roles at Cisco from managing corporate development technology team responsible for diligence for all acquisitions and direct investments, to product line management responsibility for Cisco’s cable broadband business.
Bruno Raimondo, VP product management: was previously director of product management at Riverbed, in the emerging fields of cloud-acceleration and cloud application performance management; was a staff product manager at VMware, leading product strategy and CEO-sponsored special initiatives to extend the reach of virtualization beyond compute; served in a variety of roles at Cisco and was part of the founding team of Andiamo.

Number of employees:
Approximately 50

Technology:
Maginatics replaces or consolidates traditional NAS appliances in the public, private or hybrid cloud of choice. Its software-only platform comprises a set of software components that can be deployed to deliver a global namespace, securely accessible from any device or location. It is cloud agnostic and sits atop a number of cloud (object) storage platforms.

Product description:
At the foundation of the Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform (MCSP) is the Maginatics Virtual Filer (MVF). It employs an elastic cloud-optimized distributed file system to deliver a global namespace, data consistency, WAN optimization, end-to-end security, application compatibility, edge and mobile connectivity and other enterprise-critical features and benefits in a single integrated fabric. It supports a variety of endpoint devices such as PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

The three components of MCSP

Some differentiators of the offering:

POSIX and Windows compatibility
Multi-Layer Adaptive Caching (client, site, CDN)
256-bit AES encryption
Native mobile clients delivering access from Android and iOS
Data transfer auto-tuning
DR, hot standby, one-click DR, VM healing

Clouds supported

Compute: VMware vSphere 4.x or newer, Amazon Web Services EC2, Google Compute Engine
Storage – private: Basho Riak CS (1.3 or newer), Ceph (S3 API compatible), Cleversafe, Cloudian (2.4.3 or newer), EMC Atmos, EMC ViPR, OpenStack Swift (Temp URL authentication required) (Essex or newer), Scality RING Organic (4.0 or newer)
Storage – public: Amazon Web Services S3, DreamObjects, EMC Atmos Online, Google Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud Files, all other clouds that are API-compatible with EMC Atmos, S3 or OpenStack Swift

Native clients supported

Windows: Win7, Win8, Win2008 R2, Win2012
Mac: OS X 10.7 (Lion) or newer
Linux: Ubuntu 12.04, CentOS 6.3, RHEL 5.9 or newer
iOS: 4.3 or newer
Android: 4.1 or newer
Web client: Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 25, Firefox 24, Safari 6.0 (Mac), Safari 5.1.4 (Windows)

Released dates:
MCSP latest V3.0 became available on June 30, 2014, first version in September 2012.

Pricing:
The software is available via annual subscription or perpetual license. Average client pays tens of thousands of dollars a year, according to Raimondo, cited by Bloomberghttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-20/intel-leads-17-million-financing-of-maginatics.html.

Technology partners:
Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Basho, Cisco, Cleversafe, Cloudian, EMC, Google, HP, Mirantis, OpenStack, Rackspace, Scality, VMware

Customers:
Fortune 1000 enterprises and service providers that count enterprises among the customers they serve

Applications:

Elastic NAS: Migration of applications and data to cloud environments
NAS Consolidation: Consolidation of previously distributed or silo’d data into one or more centrally-managed object stores, plus secure access to that data from the ‘enterprise edge’ on any any-device, anywhere basis

Target Market:
Large law firms, marketing and advertising agencies and holding companies, manufacturing and software development companies, and institutions of higher education; enterprise NAS market, especially NetApp

Competitors:
Services but not software from Egnyte, Box and Dropbox in some cases but Maginatics doesn’t have a consumer offering