Start-Up’s Profile: Cirtas Systems

The start-up didn’t disclose a lot of information as it is currently in stealth mode. Here is what we got.

Company:
Cirtas Systems, Inc.

Headquarters:
San Jose, CA

Born in:
2008

Funding:
Funding closed in January 2009 but the company declines to disclose its funding level until launch time.  

Investors:
Lightspeed Venture Partners (Barry Eggers, MD) and NEA (Krishna "Kittu" Kolluri, general partner)

Main executives:

• Dan Decasper, co-founder and CEO, ran formerly the WANScaler and Branch Repeater engineering teams at Citrix. arriving in this firm through its acquisition of WAN optimization company Orbital Data in 2006 for $60 million, where he served as the CTO. Prior to that, he co-founded Jibe Networks and served as its CEO through its acquisition by Orbital Data.
• Allen Samuels, co-founder and chief architect, was previously founder and chief architect at the same Orbital Data. Before that, he led a consulting practice where he architected a network security accelerator that was incorporated into the Cisco 4000 series router, a 3-D graphics chip and a SAN virtualization appliance. Earlier in his career he served eleven years at Weitek ending as VP and CTO, and was a member of the technical staff at Harris Corp., where he was instrumental in the design and architecture of hardware and software for 64-bit supercomputers and associated OS. Allen started his career at Burroughs as a developer for one of the industry’s first multiprocessor mainframe OS.
• Josh Goldstein, VP of marketing, joined Cirtas in 2009. Prior to Cirtas, he was VP of product marketing for DataDirect Networks where he led the development and launch of the Web Object Scaler cloud storage infrastructure product. He worked formerly for Ixia, provider of IP performance testing equipment.
• Steve Mallard, VP of sales, was sales director, Western US and Canada at Riverbed Technology.

Number of employees:
50

Technology:
Cirtas’ Bluejet Technology is supposed to make cloud storage work just like on-site storage arrays in the enterprise data center with Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers, to provide cost savings compared to the bill customers receive from their cloud storage provider by minimizing storage, access, and transaction fees. It is also simplifying storage management.
Data is protected as if they were on a local storage array, with local storage levels of performance, but without the expense of disk drives systems taking up space and consuming power.
Bluejet uses thin provisioning so servers and applications have all the space they need without running out of space.

Product:
Cirtas Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers

Customers:
The company is currently conducting private evaluations with pre-qualified mid-to-large enterprise customers.  

Applications:
Primary enterprise storage for tiers 2 and 3 data and applications