Start-Up’s Profile: B-Virtual, in Cloud Storage

Company
B-Virtual

Headquarters
Lochristi, Belgium

Born in
2008

Funding
privately-held, no VC

Executives

•  Kristof De Spiegeleer, investor and board member, currently director in cloud computing department at Sun, investor and board member at Orange Concept, Racktivity and A-Server (part of Zenith Infotech group), in the past founder and CEO at Qlayer, acquired by Sun in 2009, also a founding member of Thebe Technologies, 2consult, Hosbasket (acquired by Telenet) and Dedigate (acquired by Terremark), but mainly known as CEO, founder and CTO of Datacenter Technologies acquired by Veritas (now Symantec) – to get de-dupe technology – in 2005 for $58 million.
• Wouter Van Eetvelde, co-founder and COO, who was also at Datacenter Technologies
• Wim de Wispelaere, co-founfer, VP sales and products, who was also at Datacenter Technologies
• Ringo De Smet, release manager, owner at Atriso BVBA, formerly senior software engineer at  EMC  

Number of employees
25

Technology
The company doesn’t offer cloud storage as a service but proposes an efficient architecture for cloud storage service providers. Even if the startup is not profitable up to now, it has already some projects with OEMs for Intranet email and online backup.

To power storage clouds, its Distributed Storage System has the advantage to store more data with less disks. "1.5TB is enough for high availability, not 4TB", said Wim De Wispelaere. The objects, including a CRC for each ones, are cut in small parts with variable size and stored on several disks on the cloud. De Wispelaere speaks about ‘rateloss codes’. B-Virtual uses Information Dispersal Algorithms that have been used in telecommunications to enhance the reliability of transmissions to satellites. "The original message is divided in a large number of message-blocks, typically a few thousands. These are converted to an even larger number of check-blocks. The algorithm allows reconstructing the original data from any set of check-blocks, independent of the order in which they are received. In telecommunications this allows the receiver to decode the original message correctly, even if a percentage of check-blocks would get corrupted or lost in transmission," according to the company.

No RAID is used to protect the data. Its built-in redundant data generator generates an unlimited number of data frames from the original data. These frames ares stored globally across multiple data centers, racks, storage servers and HDDs to meet the availability policy. Continuous data integrity check algorithms automatically detect data loss and silent disk corruption. In such event data will be be correccted without the need for operator intervention. Finally, it uses less capacity than the combination of RAID and replication and eliminates backup. The B-Virtual storage system offers block and file interfaces. Storage capacity can reach petabytes: to increase it, the user adds storage nodes automatically aggregated to the host pool.

Applications
Cloud storage services, backup, archiving, file and digital media storage

Market
Internet service providers and corporate network operators