Start-Up Profile: Versity Software

HQs
San Francisco, CA

Date founded
April 1, 2011

Financial funding
Company said that it has no venture capital financing, the firm being controlled by its founders, but there was a series A financing and a strategic partnership both with Cray in November 2013.

Co-founders

CEO Bruce Gilpin is a director of electric vehicle maker Brammo, Inc. He oversees sales and marketing, finance, legal, administration and corporate strategy of the start-up. He also works with customers and partners to build long term relationships. Prior to Versity, he held senior corporate development, strategy, finance, and operational management positions with Internet and mobile software companies including USWeb/CKS, Intend Change, and MobiTV. He is a private company advisor and investor.
CTO Harriet Coverston oversees product strategy, software development, software testing, and support. Her software design and architecture skills combined with her ability to write software code have made her a pioneer in the high performance storage and archiving fields. Prior to Versity, she held senior technical roles at Sun Microsystems and Control Data.

Product description
Versity Storage Manager (VSM) is a large scale enterprise data archiving application available on Red Hat Linux and CentOS. It uses multi-threaded SAM (Storage and Archive Manager)-QFS (Quick File System) bought by Sun acquired by Oracle. It offers data management for tiered storage environments and the ability to preserve and protect data forever with S3 object storage interface. It supports tape libraries from Spectra Logic, StorageTek, IBM, and Quantum especially LTO-4, -5, and -6 tape devices and IBM 3592 drives.

Key Features

Based on open-source SAM-QFS
Runs on Linux
Flexible feature set for defining archive storage policies
Tunable system parameters to ensure optimal performance
Tools to manage primary disk utilization
Dynamic ability to grow or shrink file systems
Open-source file format, open APIs
Supports virtually unlimited archive
Simple approach minimizes management overhead
Automatically migrates data to media
Efficiently utilizes storage media – releasing obsolete files and repacking moveable ones
Creates multiple copies of files and manages multiple archive sets
Supports DR planning
Minimizes downtime with instant media retrieval
Migrates files to newer media
Instant file restoration in the event of hardware failure

Released date
April 1, 2014 for V1.0

Applications
Large scale high performance data archiving

Pricing
VSM is a subscription software product. The license and support are bundled together in one monthly, quarterly, or annual fee. Versity does not offer a perpetual software license. Pricing is based upon archive size – small, medium, large, and mega.

Partners
Cray, Spectra Logic. The Cray Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS) product is an engineered solution featuring a software stack including VSM along with the hardware and support required for deploying reliable large-scale mission critical archives.

Distributors and OEMs
None

Target market
HPC, oil and gas, entertainment, scientific, government – on premise private cloud and public cloud.

Among customers
15 to 20 customers including Ovation Data Systems (250PB) and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) through $80 million contract in 2014 with Cray including 18PB of DataWarp and Sonexion 2000 storage capacity.

Competitors
Quantum, SGI, IBM, Oracle