Start-Up's Profile: Coho Data

Company
Coho Data, Inc. (formerly Convergent.io)

Location
HQs in Sunnyvale, CA, development office in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Year founded
2011

Financial funding
$10 million series A as Convergent.io by Andreessen Horowitz in August 2012 and most recently $25 million series B by the same investor as well as Ignition Partners

Executives and co-founders

Ramana Jonnala, CEO: he started with Veritas Software in building large-scale storage architectures, and then led the product team at Xensource in delivering the first open-source virtualization platform. After Citrix acquired XenSource, he served as VP of Citrix’s virtualization management division and led the product team in delivering the first bare metal hypervisor for client devices.
Andrew Warfield, CTO: he is is a researcher in computer systems, specializing in storage, virtualization and security. As a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, he was one of the original authors of the Xen hypervisor, and has since done research in virtualization and HA. At XenSource and Citrix, he was the technical director for storage and emerging technologies.
Keir Fraser, chief architect: he was previously co-founder of XenSource and principal author of the Xen hypervisor. He advised chip vendors on how to best support virtualization in their architectures, and has frequently provided expert consulting on the application of virtualization in emerging datacenter products.

Note as board member Peter Levine, general partner at Andreesen Horowitz, previously SVP and GM, data center and cloud division, Citrix, and an early employee of Veritas Software.

Number of employees
40

Products description
Coho Data takes its inspiration from the public cloud, combining scale-out software on commodity hardware to deliver pay-as-you-grow economics in an on-premise private cloud setting. Customers start with a 2U appliance, Datastream 1000, that delivers 40TB – including 3.2TB flash memory – , and 180,000 IO/s, with the use of an Arista 10GbE switch. Users can then grow the system in a modular way. It holds two “microarrays” managed by DataStream’s OpenFlow controller. It stores data on the backend as objects and protects data by replicating duplicate objects on other microarrays in the cluster. The company adds innovations including a storage stack optimized for Intel PCIe flash and the use of software-defined networking to embed storage intelligence in the network, its patented DataStream architecture offers linear performance scaling with zero bottlenecks that is twice the price/performance of expensive all-flash arrays and 18x the performance of traditional storage products, according to the company.

DataStream 1000

DataStream Storage Architecture

Released date
Company emerged from stealth mode on October 15 and the product, to be announced later this year, is not available yet but pilots are be run in large organizations including University of British Columbia.

Price range
The Coho DataStream storage system starts at $2.50/GB with pre-de-dupe and compression. System of 190TB in 11U is listed at $530,000 and reaching 900,000 IO/s.

Distribution
Product is sold directly and via a small set of strategic VARs.

Applications
Primary storage for VMware/ESX environments

Target market
Mid to enterprise size businesses

Competitors
Traditional vendors like Netapp, EMC, HP, etc.