Start-Up's Profile: Skylable

HQs
London, UK

Date founded
March 1, 2013 by original team behind ClamAV, acquired in 2007 by SourceFire in 2007 and part of Cisco

Financial funding
Seed round from Sunstone Capital in Copenhagen, Denmark, amount not being disclosed

Main executives

Luca Gibelli, co-founder and CEO, started his career as the co-founder of Stardata srl, in the computer database consulting market in Italy and later joined ClamAV, designing and deploying a content delivery network of 150 servers distributed in 50 countries; was also responsible for secure storing a few dozens of terabytes of malicious files.
Tomasz Kojm, CTO, original author of ClamAV, open-source anti-virus for Unix.
Alberto Wu, chief architect, joining from ClamAV.
Edwin Török, developer, specialist in secure systems programming and compilers, mastering C, C++ and OCaml, and prior to co-founding Skylable, was involved into ClamAV as the developer and architect of its core components.

Number of employees
9

Products description
Based on software-defined storage, Skylable Sx is a reliable, fully distributed cluster solution for storage needs. It can aggregate the disk space available on multiple servers and merge it into a single storage system. The cluster makes sure that data are always replicated over multiple nodes (the exact number of copies is defined by the system administrator) and synchronized. Additionally Sx has built-in support for de-dupe, client-side encryption, and on-the-fly compression. The company also developed file-sync apps for PC (Mac OSX, Windows, Linux) and mobile (Android and iOS) talking directly to storage backend through a RESTful interface, like Owncloud, the main difference being that these apps talk directly to company’s storage backend, which provides replica, de-dupe and failover. The storage backend is written in C, unlike Owncloud which uses PHP and relies on a third-party for the storage. Sx lets developer and operations teams set up secure private or hybrid storage clouds in a matter of minutes. It runs on commodity hardware and, in the tradition of enterprise open source, and provides a model replacement to costly storage hardware appliances and hosted services.
Skylable also released LibreS3 0.3 released, an open Source implementation of the Amazon S3 service.
Gibellli said:” In pure open-source spirit, we learned from their mistakes and designed our solutions to satisfy what we call the six S’s of Skylable: Security, Simplicity, Scalability, Speed, Savings, Source code. Any company who needs to store more than a few terabytes of data will benefit from it.”

Released date
April 9, 2013

Price
Free, open source, GPL licence.

Roadmap
Current release 0.9 and 1.0 due on November 10, 2014

Number of customers
120,000 downloads in first six months, early users including RKB Bearing Industries Group and Glow Digital Media

Applications
Object and cloud storage

Target market
Medium and large companies that choose to build their own cloud storage rather than putting their data in public clouds.

Competitors
ownCloud, Swift, Ceph