Just Out of Stealth Mode, Start-Up Datera, Formerly RisingTide

This company emerges today from stealth mode.

Company
Datera, Inc. (formerly RisingTide Systems founded in 2008, name changed in 2013)

HQs
Mountain View, CA (moving to bigger office in two weeks)

Date founded
2013

Financial funding
Total of $40 million in two rounds (series A and B) from Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Silicon Valley luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim and Pradeep Sindhu. In November 2015, Square 1 Bank, a division of Pacific Western Bank, provided a $7.5 million credit facility to Datera.

Revenue
The company hit its 1Q16 goal which is in the seven figures before its launch.

Founders and main executives
Founders, CEO Marc Fleischmann, CTO Nicholas Bellinger and architect Claudio Fleiner were the creators and maintainers of the Linux IO storage stack with expertise in distributed policy management, hyperscale, storage systems and Linux IO optimization.

Marc Fleischmann was co-founder of the Open Source Business Alliance, CEO and founder of RisingTide Systems, smeet.com (sMeet Communications GmbH) and IMF.

Nicholas Bellinger was founder and chief architect of Linux-iSCSI.org and co-founder and CTO of RisingTide Systems.
Claudio Fleiner was lead engineer at OptumSoft and formerly research staff member for more than six years at IBM Almaden Research Center worked on IceCube, a 3D modular storage and compute server built from individual bricks.
Chief architect Oleg Kiselev was formerly lead architect a HDS and chief architect of
ParaScale after spending 17 years at Veritas Software.
VP engineering Maurilio Cometto was previously principal development manager for Azure Cloud Division of Microsoft, VP engineering at Storsimple after working for Andiamo and Cisco.

Advisory board includes Carl Waldspurger, Steve Kleiman, Michael Dvorkin, Martin Buhr, Eric Baldeschwieler and Steve Mullaney.

Number of employees
50

Technology
AWS-like elastic block storage to enterprises and service providers

Products description
“The methods that worked for administering storage in the pre-cloud era do not scale to the degree required to manage modern DevOps environments. To achieve the responsiveness and agility demanded of today’s IT leaders requires fundamentally changing the way storage is controlled“, according to Datera.

Datera Elastic Data Fabric is a storage solution for enterprise and service provider clouds that is designed with DevOps style operations in mind. It is a scale-out storage software that turns standard, commodity hardware into a RESTful API-driven, policy-based storage fabric for large-scale clouds.

Elastic Data Fabric brings elastic block storage efficiency, control and economics to cloud data centers. It natively integrates through iSCSI with OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware vSphere and container orchestration platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos.

Key features include:

API-first operations provides web-scale automation with full infrastructure programmability.
Policy-based configuration leaves the details to Elastic Data Fabric so customers can optimize price/performance for each application without hand-crafting every LUN.
Grow-as-you-go model so customers only buy what they need when they need it. The scale-out architecture means customers do not need to compromise on performance or capacity.
Flash-first design delivers efficiency and low latency (<1ms) across distributed, diverse storage media types. This maximizes application performance and access density.
Multi-tenancy and quality of service for cloud-native and traditional workloads optimizes asset utilization and simplifies operations across containers, VMs and bare-metal.
Heterogeneous component support makes it possible for IT and DevOps to seamlessly scale across many configurations and generations of industry standard x86 servers with multiple storage media types

Datera Elastic Data Fabric is available in a ‘grow-as-you-go model’ both as software-only and appliance versions. Starting configurations deliver 150TB of capacity with 150,000 IO/s and seamlessly support scaling mix-and-match node configurations.

Released date
January 2016

Customers
In production by multiple large enterprises and service providers worldwide

Target market
Enterprise and public clouds

Competitors
SolidFire, ScaleIO, Ceph

Read also:
Craig Nunes CMO, Datera
Former VP of global marketing, HP storage
by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2015.11.10 | News
RisingTide Systems Changes Name to Datera
Start-up’s CEO remains Marc Fleischmann.
by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2014.01.01 | News
Emerging RisingTide Announces MediaCStor
Storage system to play 1000 HD videos from device the size of 1U pizza box
2011.06.28 | Press Release
RisingTide Systems, a Storage Start-Up in Stealth Mode
Supposed to be involved in IP open source storage software
by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2009.07.16 | News
Neterion Supports iSCSI for I/O Intensive Applications
(Neterion partnered with RisingTide)
Network adapter enabling virtual machines to run at 10GbE
2009.07.07 | Press Release