Start-Up's Profile: Maxta

Location
Sunnyvale, CA

Year founded
2009

Financial funding
$10 million in series A by Andreessen Horowitz

Main executives

Yoram Novick, founder and CEO: formerly founded Topio acquired by NetApp, following the NetApp acquisition served as VP and GM of NetApp’s data replication business unit, prior to Topio spent 13 years at IBM in storage R&D capacities, holds 25 patents in systems and storage.
Amar Rao, VP business development and OEM sales: Prior to joining Maxta in 2012, was VP of business development at EVault, a Seagate company, was SVP marketing, business development and OEM operations for Kashya Inc. acquired by EMC in 2006 and where he served as VP of business development for the software group, began his career at IBM where he served in roles including VP of finance and operations for IBM Global Services, India.
Steve Velardi, VP WW sales: worked at EMC, Veritas, Cisco, and IPL Systems, over the recent years VP positions at Actona (purchased by Cisco), Powerfile (purchased by HLDS), and Infineta Systems (purchased by Riverbed), most recently was with Vello Systems.
Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, director product management and marketing: joined Maxta in 2013 after spending nearly five years as lead software product manager for HP, where he led server virtualization strategy for HP’s 3par storage division; was also product manager Mendocino Software and technical marketing engineer for NetApp, and prior to that, was at NetIQ and Taos Mountain.

At the board note Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Peter Levine, who was SVP and GM, data center and cloud division at Citrix, and an early employee of Veritas.

Number of employees
20

Product description
Its hypervisor agnostic, highly resilient, scalable, software-defined VM-centric storage platform enables the convergence of applications, server virtualization and storage on standard servers. The Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP) mashes virtualized and physical storage into one single-pool view. Optimized for flash performance and disk drive capacity, it eliminates the need for external storage arrays. It integrates with virtualization at all levels from UI to data management, making it simple to manage while supporting all possible deployments of virtual data centers, including private and public clouds. MxSP employs capacity optimization capabilities like thin provisioning, inline compression and de-dupe, as well as snapshots and cloning. It’s available for VMWare only, with support of Microsoft and Citrix to come.

Maxta Storage Architecture

Release date
Emerged from stealth mode on November 12, 2013 but the product was available since July 2013, being in limited availability deployed in paying customer production environments since 2012.

Distribution
Through the channel and eventually to OEMs in the future

Applications
Enterprise storage for virtual server environments

Target market
Small to large enterprises, as well as private and public cloud deployments

Known customer
VSS Monitoring, a Danaher company

Competitors
Traditional storage vendors like EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, Dell, VMware (VSAN), and also smaller firms like Nutanix or Simplivity.