Start-Up Profile: SoftNAS

HQs
Houston, TX

Date founded
2012

Financial funding
$1.4 million angel funding

Main executives

Rick Braddy is the former CTO of the Citrix Systems XenApp and XenDesktop group and former group architect with BMC Software.
Michael Goodwin, GM, COO and CFO, spent first 10 years of his professional career with Texas Commerce Bank, Accenture and as a director with Continental Airlines that he left to co-found Winrock HR where he served as CFO and COO.
Bryon Thomas, VP marketing, spent 12 years with Citrix in various executive roles, most recently leading the worldwide services marketing team; prior to that, he held a variety of executive roles with Redback Networks (acquired by Ericsson) and Alcatel-Lucent in the Caribbean and Latin America region
Lisa Waldman, VP sales, held senior-level sales positions with GreenBytes, Centrix Software, Desktone, Softricity and Citrix.

Revenue
50% average monthly growth during the first half of 2014

Technology
SoftNAS is a software-defined, enterprise-grade NAS filer delivered as a virtual storage appliance that runs on private, public and hybrid cloud computing platforms, including AWS, Azure Hyper-V, vSphere and vCloud Air. It provides enterprise-grade NAS capabilities, including cross-zone HA with automatic failover. The architecture storage solution is built upon open source technologies at its foundation, Linux and ZFS. It is designed for businesses that need enterprise-grade NAS features and data protection without high up-front costs.

It offers:

Full-featured storage software
Compatibility with all popular hardware, software and cloud platforms
Data protection
Performance-tuned, using several features to maximize performance, IO/s and data throughput
Built with a simple interface and wizard-driven

For DevOps teams who need NFS, CIFS and iSCSI shared storage in the cloud, they can use the same ‘agile storage’ infrastructure during development and QA as used in production. QA and development are able to develop and test with copies of actual production data and with the SoftNAS API and CLI tools.

Released date
11/2014: V3.2 for SoftNAS Cloud and Express Edition, with a usable capacity up to 1TB and integration with Docker
10/2014 – Azure support
2/2013 – AWS support
2/2013 – vSphere and Hyper-V Support

Prices
SoftNAS Cloud for AWS from $0.18/hour
SoftNAS Cloud for Azure from $0.18/hour – starts at $495 per month up to 16TB
SoftNAS Cloud for Hyper-V from $119/month
SoftNAS Cloud for VMware vCloud Air from $119/month
SoftNAS Cloud for VMware, on-premise private/public/hybrid cloud from $119/month
SoftNAS Coud Express Edition starting at $119 per month or $0.18 per hour

Distributors
Being in AWS and Azure marketplace

Number of customers
250+

Main customers
The Street, Siemens, Yelp, Netflix, Boeing, MARS Inc., McGraw Hill, Technicolor, Starz, RioTinto, Logitech, Edmunds.com, Purdue University, University of California Irvine, Atypon

Target market
Public cloud, on-premise, enterprise

Competitors
Include Zadara, NetApp, EMC/Maginatics