Start-Up's Profile: DriveScale

HQs
Sunnyvale, CA

Date founded
March 6, 2013

Financial funding

$500,000 seed round
$17.5 million series A in 2016 from Pelion Venture Partners, Foxconn’s Ingrasys Tech Inc., and Nautilus Venture Partners

Main executives

Gene Banman, CEO: The serial CEO for the past 15 years has been at the helm of three companies prior to DriveScale: NetContinuum sold to Barracuda Networks, Zero Motorcycles, ClearPower Systems sold to Questor Technologies. He was at Sun Microsystems as SVP and GM of desktop systems group and also led the workstation product group. He was based in Japan for five years as president of Nihon-Sun.
Satya Nishtala, co-founder and CTO: He was formerly a technology fellow at Nuova Systems acquired in 2008 by Cisco, and became the UCS servers and Nexus switches division. He also served as VP of technology at Netillion. As a distinguished engineer of Sun, his contributions included the systems architecture for all of the Sun workstations and work group servers as well as Sun storage systems through the 1990s.
Tom Lyon, co-ounder and chief scientist: He was founder and chief scientist of Nuova Systems acquired by Cisco, whose UCS servers and Nexus switches are based on Nuova’s technology. He was also founder and CTO of Netillion and Ipsilon Networks, acquired by Nokia. As employee #8 at Sun, he was there from the beginning, where he contributed to the UNIX kernel, created the SunLink product family, and was one of the NFS and SPARC architects. He started his Silicon Valley career at Amdahl Corp.
Duane Northcutt, co-founder and VP: He was previously SVP and CTO of the Connected Home Division of Technicolor (formerly Thomson), CTO and SVP at Trident Microsystems, and CTO and VP of system architecture at Silicon Image. He served was VP of technology at Kealia acquired by Sun. He was a distinguished engineer at Sun where he conceived of and led the development of the Sun Ray desktop product.
Howard Doherty, VP sales: He was formerly VP of Arkeia Software, sold to WD, a Western Digital Company, where he served as director of sales for business storage solutions. He was VP of WW sales at Symphoniq, and VP of WW sales and business development at NetContinuum, acquired by Barracuda. He has also held senior sales roles at Cisco, Netscape and Avenue Technologies.
S.K. Vinod, VP product management: He founded Xsigo Systems in 2004 where he held a variety of positions, including leading the product management and business development teams, managing the sales consulting team and was also responsible for APAC sales. After Xsigo was acquired by Oracle in late 2012, he managed the networking and Netra product management teams and was responsible of products ranging from IB switches and adapters to NEBS compliant servers. Prior to that, he spent 9 years at Sun launching and managing servers, microprocessors and chipsets after being at Xerox PARC in an imaging system start-up venture.

Revenue
Just taking first orders now

Number of employees
21

Products description
The start-up is engaged in data center orchestration software for big data applications.

DriveScale offers a rack scale architecture based on hardware and software interface technology that brings the advantages of proprietary scale-up infrastructure environments to the commodity scale-out world.

With the product, you can flexibly deploy and manage independent pools of resources in scale-out, just as you have been doing in scale-up.

DriveScale enables administrators to:
• Dynamically adjust compute and storage infrastructure to handle changing application and business needs
• Optimize resource allocation without overprovisioning

Application stacks can be deployed without modification on physical infrastructure that is tailored for the deployment and can be easily updated in software as needs change.

Manageability extends across clusters to data center scale, allowing administrators to share resources fluidly across clusters, maximizing responsiveness.

With DriveScale, the ratio of compute to storage in servers and clusters is a software-defined operation using composable infrastructure technology. Administrators can provision and reconfigure physical resource ratios to optimize for different and changing applications and workloads. It enables disaggregation of servers into separate pools of compute and storage resources, and reassembles servers under software control.

Rack scale architecture provides composable infrastructure
on pooled commodity resource

The rack scale architecture consists of:
   •   DriveScale management servers
   •   DriveScale chassis: a redundant Ethernet-to-SAS adapter that converts commodity JBODs into Ethernet connected JBODs, this 1U appliance houseing four DriveScale adapters, each with two 10GbE SFP+ ports and two 12Gb SAS connections.
   •   Industry standard servers, deployed with software agents
   •   Industry standard JBODs
   •   Industry standard 10GbE network infrastructure

DriveScale adapter

In contrast to the pre-integrated storage and compute resources found in rack server chassis, the architecture differs by enabling industry standard servers to be disaggregated and deployed as pools of industry standard disk-lite compute servers and commodity hardware disks housed within commodity JBODs

Released date
May, 2016

Price range
~$2,000 per node

Partners
Hortonworks, Cloudera, Dell, Cisco and HPE, hardware supplier agreement with Ingrasys

Distributors
RAID Inc. to expand in HPC, others to be announced

Number of customers
No one revealed

Application
Hadoop implementation

Target market
Big data computer/storage infrastructure orchestration