Start-Up Profile: Igneous

HQs
Seattle, WA

Date founded
October 2013, just out of sleath mode

Financial funding
$26.7 million raised from Madrona Venture Group, New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint Ventures, and individual investors including Isilon co-founder and CEO Sujal Patel, getting $3 million in 2013 and $23.6 million series A in 2014

Main executives

Kiran Bhagesphur, CEO and co-founder – has more than 20 years experience in enterprise technology, the last six of which he spent in engineering leadership roles at Isilon. Most recently, he served as the VP of engineering at EMC where he spearheaded all aspects of product development in the Isilon storage division.

Jeff Hughes, CTO and co-founder – former director, engineering, Isilon storage division of EMC
Byron Rakitzis, architect and co-founder – first non-founding employee of NetApp
Asif Daud, VP engineering – former director of engineering, Isilon storage division of EMC
Steve Pao, CMO – former SVP and GM of security business at Barracuda Networks
Christian Smith, VP products – former field engineering leadership at NetApp, Isilon, and EMC
Marc Tanguay, VP strategic sales – former strategic sales leadership at NetApp, Isilon, and EMC

Number of employees
<50

Technology
Igneous customers have a common problem, which was managing data that they can’t or won’t send to the cloud:

They can’t because the data sizes are so large and they could not afford the latency of Internet speeds.
They won’t because they view their data as proprietary and a core part of the IP their companies are built on.

At the core of the offering is a technology platform designed with four main benefits:

separate on-premises data plane with a cloud management plane designed for remote management at hyper scale
RatioPerfect architecture which provides ARM-based CPU and Ethernet to every drive, both to eliminate I/O bottlenecks and to minimize the size of failure domains
Extensible data path to enable the platform to extend beyond storage to higher level functions (to be announced) without affecting latency
Cloud services architecture to enable insertion into modern data workflows

Igneous has been granted 11 patents in the US to date.

Click to enlarge

RadioPerfect – Designed for Scale

The solution consists of three components:

An on premises appliance (or set of appliances) where the data lives
A cloud service where systems can be remotely managed and monitored
utomated cloud management that ensures that customers do not need to worry about upgrades, trouble shooting or failure management

Products description
It provides cloud infrastructure for data you can’t or won’t move off-premises. The service includes installation of on-premises equipment owned and managed by the company, and it offers API-driven and automated access to the types of cloud-native services with public cloud infrastructure.

The first product, the Igneous Data Service, is an on-premises content store for large, unstructured data sets offered as a pay as you go, zero-touch solution.

Released date
October 11, 2016

Price range
Pricing starts at under $40,000 per year at 212TB increments (i.e., equates to under $200/TB/year, or approximately 1.5 cents/GB/month of installed capacity)

Distribution
Selling through IT reseller partners

Applications
Large, unstructured data sets; machine-generated data (IoT); log management; consolidated archives; backup targets; integration with other applications supporting S3 API for object storage

Read also:
Igneous Assigned Patent
Stateless processing of replicated state for distributed storage systems
2016.08.19 | In Brief
Igneous Assigned Patent
Wireless storage chassis
2016.06.23 | In Brief
Igneous Assigned Patent
Prioritized repair of storage failures
2016.05.05 | In Brief
Igneous Systems Assigned Patent
Network bootstrapping for distributed storage system
2016.04.05 | In Brief
Igneous Systems Assigned Patent
Distributed storage data repair air via partial data rebuild within execution path
2016.01.15 | In Brief
Igneous Systems Assigned Patent
Efficiency for erasure encoding
2015.09.11 | In Brieft
Igneous Systems Assigned Patent
Network addressable storage controller with storage drive profile comparison
2015.08.04 | In Brief
Igneous Systems Assigned Patent
Extensible data path
2015.07.17 | In Brief