Start-Up Profile: Reduxio

Company
Reduxio Systems, Inc.

Location
HQ in San Francisco, CA with offices in Los Angeles, CA, Houston, TX, Atlanta, GA, Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Boston, MA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel

Date founded
August 2012

Financial funding

• Round A: $12 million from Intel Capital, Jerusalem Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures
• Round B: $15 million round led by Seagate Technology and former investors

Total: $27 million

Revenue
Less than $10 million

Main executives

Mark Weiner, founder and CEO, joins from Exanet where he served as CEO and leads its acquisition by Dell. Prior to that, he was executive chairman of StoreAge Networking Technologies and oversaw its acquisition by LSI. He also spent 10 years at NetApp, being its first 100 employees and serving in various technical and sales roles and finally as VP of Western EMEA. Formerly he worked at Auspex, which introduced the first NAS. He lives in Amsterdam with his wife and two children, and trains and teaches Aikibujutsu, a Japanese martial art.

John Williams, president, has held technical, sales and executive roles in NetApp, F5 Networks (EMEA VP), 3Com, Auspex (technical director Europe), Swan Labs where he rebuilt the sales organization leading to the acquisition by F5, and Bridge Communications (systems administrator) acquired by 3Com. As VP at NetApp, he was one of their first 50 employees. Amongst his roles, he founded a business unit that grew annual sales to over a $1 billion. He also led WW sales for NetApp’s Content Delivery Business Unit. He resides in Colorado with his wife, two children and their Rhodesian Ridgeback. When he isn’t attending to family or business you will probably find him ultra-running.

Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing and corporate strategy officer, taught courses on marketing and entrepreneurship at Hult International Business School, the Technical University of Denmark, MIT Sloan School of Management and advised many start-ups and early stage venture capital firms. He served as an early, pre-product and pre-revenue executive team member and CMO at seven venture capital-backed enterprise technology start-ups. Two of them went public and strategic acquirers, including AT&T, IBM, Iron Mountain, Oracle, Symantec and Synopsys, purchased five. He held roles as MD of the Southboro Capital Group, MD of start-up .NEXT Boston (part of the top tier Techstars network of global start-up accelerators) and community impact fellow at OpenIDEO. As a strategy consultant, he spent several years with McKinsey and Co.

Jacob Cherian, VP product management and product strategy, spent 14 years at Dell in the enterprise storage group leading product development and architectural initiatives for host storage, NAS, SAN, RAID and other data center infrastructure. As a member of Dell’s storage architecture council he was responsible for developing strategy for unstructured data management and drove its implementation through organic development efforts and technology acquisitions such as Ocarina Networks and Exanet. In his last role as a Dell expatriate in Israel he oversaw Dell’s FluidFS development. He started his career in Dell as a development engineer for SAN, NAS and host-side solutions, then served as the architect and technologist for Dell’s MD series of external storage arrays. He holds over 45 patents in the areas of storage and networking.

Nir Peleg, founder and CTO, joins after a series of ventures. He co-founded and served as the CTO of Montilio, and then founded Exanet where he was EVP of R&D and CTO. Prior to that, he was the first employee and chief architect of Digital Appliance, Larry Ellison’s massively parallel computing venture that eventually became Pillar Data Systems, acquired by Oracle. He also worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he led a European pre-sale and special projects team, focusing on Unix-based Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) systems. He started his career in Tel Aviv University School of Mathematical Science, where he managed the computer science lab, one of the first Unix installations in Israel. He holds over 20 U.S. patents and patents-pending in the areas of computer systems, distributed storage, data de-dupe and encryption.

Amnon A. Strasser, founder and VP research, is coming from Tutis, a consulting firm he founded with Nir Peleg. He was responsible for various large-scale software projects such as leading the porting of Linux to a TI DSP platform for a set-top box product. Among Tutis clients which he advised to were Ethos Networks, EZchip, WebTview Ltd., Voltaire Inc., TX Instruments, VCs firms. He co-founded Exanet where he served as VP software development and technologies. Prior to that, he consulted companies including Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, HP, Amdocs. Formerly he worked as a manager in CCI Israel/UniPower. He also holds 8 U.S. patents and patents-pending in the areas of computer systems and storage scalability and reliability.

Dror Granot, VP engineering, was at Dell, where he served as software project director overseeing the development of Dell FluidFS Clustered NAS core architecture from its early days in Exanet, through the acquisition by Dell. In his last role in Dell he led the core architecture, file system and protocols engineering teams, responsible for integration of FluidFS with Dell’s storage ecosystem of products: EqualLogic, PowerVault, Compellent and Ocarina Networks. Before joining Exanet and Dell, he served as software development team leader in Precise Software (acquired by Veritas). He began his career as a lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force, developing software for its primary air control system. He was a local champion of tennis when he was young. He still regularly plays, as well as snowboarding for fun.

Number of employees
70

Technology
At the core of every Reduxio system is the TimeOS storage OS. Traditional storage system architectures are based on the idea that the volume is a container for data and a host I/O is a request by the host to store data in a volume. This dates back to the time when a volume represented a device within a computer. Reduxio’s metadata architecture starts with data, the volume and the location are tags on the data. When receiving a piece of data from a host, it interprets the volume and offset information as identifying information that the host may use in the future to retrieve the data; the volume and offset information do not convey information about expected location. This allows for abstraction of the logical view of data from an application’s point of view which is the volume from the details of how of the blocks of data are stored and managed. This allows for functions such as in-line de-dupe and transparent migration of data between media types become inherent, built-in capabilities rather than add-on features. Only a single copy of a unique physical block must be stored in the storage media, and data can be migrated across tiers and systems transparently and independent of the logical point of access to data enabling new data management capabilities.

Products description

HX550 platfom – This enterprise flash storage with recovery to any second, is a flash-based system with continuous tiering to high-capacity media, offering up to 120TB in 2U array with high performance in real application workloads.

System Software: TimeOS 2.0 – Patented storage OS that encapsulated Reduxio’s technology with the following capabilities:
    •    BackDating – Always-on data recovery at the granularity of 1s which obsoletes schedule-based snapshot, it acts as a time machine for data. A volume can be cloned to any point in time of the history of the system, for data recovery or application testing purposes, or applications can be recovered by reverting volumes.
    •    Tier-X – Adaptive fine-grain continuous tiering ensures only active data is stored on flash, and data that does belong in flash is moved to cost-effective media. Customers no longer have to compromise between capacity and performance.
    •    NoDup – With always-on, in-memory, global dedupe and compression, this data reduction is the only inline data reduction technology for systems with multiple types of media. Global de-dupe and compression provides storage efficiency and density. Real time in-memory data reduction ensures memory cache is optimized and all subsequent data movement deals with optimized data delivering high performance for challenging enterprise application.
    •    StorSense – All systems are enabled with StorSense that connects to Reduxio’s support infrastructure and provides proactive monitoring of issues.

Application integration: The start-up offers application and OS integration in the form of StorApp – Application-aware management software, and StorKit – host and application integration kits.

Currently available:
    •    StorApp for vSphere (RSVV) is a storage management console natively integrated with vSphere’s existing framework. Once installed as a vSphere Web Client plug-in, VM datastores can be natively provisioned from the vSphere Web Client. Datastores and VMs can then be recovered from any point in time in the history using the integrated support for BackDating feature.
    •    StorKit for Windows Server (RSMS) host attach kit and VSS integration software help customers to store and protect Windows-based applications using BackDating.

Released date
August 2015

Price
Less than $1 per effective gigabyte

Roadmap
The firm will soon release integration for Puppet, as well as an OpenStack Cinder driver, both providing support for recover to any second with BackDating. Innovations in data protection and mobility will be announced in 2017.

Partners
VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, Veeam

Distributors and OEMs
In discussions

Number of customers
Around 100

Main customers
Array Networks, La Jolla Institute, Barnstable Police Department, El-Dorado County Office of Education, Catbird, One Workplace, Dingley Press, JetServer, VCA Consultants

Applications
Virtualized environments, databases and online archives applications, and more specifically:
    •    Virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM, OpenStack).
    •    Databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, SAP).

Target market
Enterprises

Competitors
All hybrid and all-flash storage vendors