Start-Up Profile: Springpath

Founded in 2012 by VMware veterans, Springpath is just coming out of stealth mode to reveal an enterprise data platform software that enables standard servers hosting applications to store, manage and protect data.
 
Company
Springpath, Inc. (formerly Storvisor)

HQs
Sunnyvale, CA

Date founded
May 2012

Financial funding
Total of $34 million from Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Redpoint Ventures, including a $9 million Series A round as Storvisor from Sequoia and NEA in June 2012. Stanford University is an investor.

Main executives

Mallik Mahalingam, CEO, CTO and co-founder: formerly was principal engineer at VMware, where he led networking and storage product development for almost a decade-and built enterprise virtualization products; at VMware, he also led initiatives such as VXLAN and PCI SR-IOV; prior to that, he held research roles at Hewlett Packard Laboratories and engineering roles at Intel and NetFrame Systems; he holds over 60 US patents on building complex system software products.

Correction on July 10, 2017: Terry Cunningham has been named CEO and Mallik Mahalingam remains CTO.

Terry Cunningham, CEO:  comes to Springpath after his most recent role as president and GM of Seagate’s cloud storage and DR division, Evault, Inc.; is an entrepreneur and seasoned technology business leader with over 25 years experience; has a knowledge and strength in building teams, driving organizational vision and growth, and catalyzing business success; earlier in his career he was COO at Veritas following the Veritas-Seagate Software merger in 1999. His first startup was Crystal Decisions, in enterprise reporting platform, where he drove go-to-market partnerships with companies such as Microsoft and SAP as well as approximately 700 other OEM partners.

Andrew Perry, VP sales: joined from Violin Memory, where he was the global VP, channel sales after holding sales and management roles at GridIron, Pano Logic, Timestock, and Peribit Networks, now part of Juniper Networks, and VitalSoft, now division of Lucent Technologies.

Ravi Parthasarathy, VP of product management: led the storage business at Omneon (acquired by Harmonic); prior to that, was at NetApp for 10 years, where he had various roles in product management and product marketing, including GM of the NAS business unit where he drove clustered storage strategy.

Suresh Ravoor, VP ngineering: hold senior engineering roles at VMware and led the teams for products such as Site Recovery Manager and new product initiatives such as View Composer and VMware Update Manager; prior to VMware, led the development of several SAN management products at Brocade and Sanrise.

Ashish Gupta, head of marketing: ran product marketing for Violin Memory; veteran with nearly 20 years of technology marketing experience at companies like NetApp, Juniper, and HP where he held various executive roles marketing storage, networking and security solutions.

Ajay Patel, head of operations: joined from AMD, where he led manufacturing operation for SeaMicro business unit, formerly was at Nimble Storage and held senior roles at companies such as Omneon (acquired by Harmonic), ConSentry Networks, Cisco, Seagate, and Compaq (acquired by HP).

Among the board’s directors:

• Satish Dharmaraj, founder and CEO of Zimbra, sold to Yahoo! for $350 million
• Mike Klayko, former CEO of Brocade

Technology
Software-only Springpath Data Platform is based on patent-pending Hardware Agnostic Log-structured Objects (HALO) architecture, a flash-optimized platform delivering performance, provisioning and fine-grained scale-out, with storage efficiency-empowering enterprises to innovate on a server-based independent infrastructure. This can be deployed as a hyper-convergence solution, as well as in non-hypervisor environments like containers and physical servers. Frequently accessed data is cached by DRAM and SSDs.

It integrates native snapshots and clones to protect data as well as data reduction capabilities like inline de-dupe and compression providing space savings “as high as 50%”. Data replication and rebalancing provides enterprise-grade reliability and data integrity.

To connect to public cloud, it supports vCloud Air.

The software-defined storage platform is supported on servers from Cisco, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Supermicro.

The company thinks that conventional storage arrays will soon be replaced by software-defined storage with commodity servers underneath.

Released date
Springpath Data Platform for vSphere has been in beta for over a year, and became available in January 2015.

Price
Subscription basis at $4,000/server/end-user

Roadmap
Support for Docker, Hyper-V, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and Hadoop

Techology partners
Cisco, Dell, Docker, VMware

Distributor
Tech Data

Number of customers
Two dozen including Sigma Designs

Target market
Enterprises and ROBOs

Competitors
Lot of start-ups including Amplidata, Cleversafe, Coho Data, Elastifile, Fizians, IzumoBASE, Maxta, Nexenta Pernixdata, Quobyte, Scality, SwiftStack, Zadara Storage, as well as DataCore or FalconStor, and about all the main storage vendors, even there is not really a dominant player up to now

Read also:
New Start-Up Discovered: Storvisor
In stealth mode