Start-Up’s Profile: VeloBit, Out of Stealh Mode
In software managing SSD as a cache
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on June 9, 2011 at 3:16 pmVeloBit, Inc., a developer of software that delivers improvement in storage price-performance, emerged from stealth and announced a Series A financing that funds introduction of VeloBit’s first products and an expansion in sales and marketing.
VeloBit is pioneering a new approach that can be used with any SSD to deliver performance at a lower cost. The solution allows customers to deploy SSD without changing their applications or primary storage, thus preserving their existing investments in data protection and storage management.
"The whole solid state market is coming alive right now, but adoption is still constrained as many users are trying to figure how to ‘optimally’ deploy the available technologies," said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "VeloBit’s software approach is intriguing as it flexibly addresses the two key elements of ‘optimally’ – which are to keep cost and complexity low – and should therefore resonate with users seeking a pragmatic route to enhancing the performance and economics of their storage environments."
James E. Bagley, Senior Analyst at Storage Strategies NOW, added: "Velobit’s technical approach can significantly change current price/performance assumptions for solid state drive applications."
Fairhaven Capital and Longworth Venture Partners led the financing. As part of the financing, Paul Margolis, a General Partner at Longworth Venture Partners and Rick Grinnell, a General Partner at Fairhaven Capital, joined VeloBit’s board of directors.
"The market for enterprise SSD has enormous potential and the VeloBit team is very strong and experienced," said Margolis. "We were drawn to the all-software nature of VeloBit’s solutions, which will yield cost advantages in product and distribution. In addition, VeloBit software can be bundled easily with other products, so the company will have many partnership opportunities."
Rick Grinnell commented: "We thoroughly researched the enterprise SSD market before investing in VeloBit," said Grinnell. "The VeloBit solution stands out for its price-performance and its ability to fit seamlessly with a customer’s existing infrastructure. We were also drawn by the breadth and depth of the research at VeloBit. They have significant innovations in three of the most important areas in the storage industry – data compression, data tiering, and caching."
"We are delighted to have Longworth and Fairhaven join our team," said Duncan McCallum, CEO of VeloBit. "We had multiple options for our over-subscribed Series A. We chose Fairhaven and Longworth because they have a deep understanding of the storage market and our business, deep reserves to support our future growth, and a breadth of connections."
VeloBit is currently in private beta.
Comments
Start-Up's Profile
Company
VeloBit, Inc. (formerly Phast Data Inc.)
Headquarters
Boxborough, MA
Date founded
September 2010
Financial funding
Series A by Fairhaven Capital and Longworth Venture Partners in January 2011 (but amount not announced until June 2011)
Main executives
- Duncan McCallum, CEO and co-founder: Has 15 years of experience leading and financing technology start-ups. Previously served as CEO and co-founder of Cilk Arts, a multicore solution vendor that was acquired by Intel. Prior to that, spent 10 years in the VC industry as a general partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and Flagship Ventures. Was an early investor and board member in 17 early-stage companies that produced 10 acquisitions and an aggregate market capitalization in excess of $1.5 billion. His investments included BuyerZone (acquired by Reed), DataCore Software, Datasage (Vignette), E-Dialog (GSI Commerce), Streambase, Vertica (HP), and Yantra (Sterling Commerce). Currently serves on the board of mobile applications vendor Localytics.
- Qing Yang, CTO and co-founder: Has over 20 years of experience in computer architecture research. Has published over 100 research papers along with over a dozen patents in the area of memory and storage architectures, disk I/O systems, parallel and distributed computing, and networks. Was named Distinguished Engineering Professor of College of Engineering at University of Rhode Island where he has been a faculty member since 1988. Has also done collaborative research with IBM, Intel, EMC, and several start-up companies in the Boston area.
- Prakash Manden, VP engineering: Has 20 years of experience developing high performance data protection solutions. Most recently VP engineering of the Dedupe Division of FalconStor where he architected and led development of FalconStor VTL. Previously divisional VP at CA where he ran engineering for ARCserve Backup. Spent his early career in engineering and engineering management roles at Cheyenne Software.
- Bruno Alterescu, advisor and co-founder: Has over 30 years experience in the computer and data storage industry. Joined EMC in 1987 and was one of the four original developers of Symmetrix. From 1999 till his retirement from EMC, served as senior advisor to Mike Ruettgers, president, CEO and chairman of EMC.
No. of employees
Less than ten
Technology
It's a software that delivers an improvement in storage
price-performance with a new approach that can be used with any SSD to
deliver performance at a lower cost. With VeloBit, it's possible to
deploy SSD without changing applications or primary storage systems. It
works with any block-based storage systems.
Target market
Storage performance acceleration
Our Comments
CEO Duncan didn't reveal the amount raised by VeloBit, though he told us
that it was "a fairly typical A round", probably in the single-digit
millions of US dollars.
The start-up has an intriguing technology. Normally, applications can
run with HDDs or SSDs without special software. CEO Duncan McCallum
didn't want to elaborate about the technology. He confirmed that it was
not a driver. He only said that the all-software software was working in
front of an SSD used like a cache being connected to any internal or
external primary storage devices, RAID or not, with HDDs or SSDs.
VeloBit will only sell an application software, not the SSD cache.
We can imagine that the software with special algorithms is able to determine the most critical
part or data of any application to store them - maybe after compression
- in the fast SSD cache and keep them until they are not anymore
necessary, thus reducing the number of operations on the mechanical
devices. Consequently, the end user will be able to buy only one SSD
rather than to invest in an expansive RAID full of SSDs, with the use of
a cheaper HDD disk array behind the cache.
Maybe there is a relation with a recent paper of CTO Qing Yang, at the
origin of VeloBit's technology, entitled: I-CASH: Intelligently Coupled
Array of SSD and
HDD, written with Jin
Ren, and published at The 17th IEEE International Symposium on High
Performance Computer Architecture, 2011 (HPCA'11).
Read also one of his U.S. patent (No. 5,754,888) with Yiming Hu: System
for destaging data during idle time by transferring to destage buffer,
marking segment blank, reodering data in buffer, and transferring to
beginning of segment.
The software will be announced "in the next few months", said Duncan.
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