[Updated] Start-Up's Profile: Nexenta Systems

This is an update of a start-up's profile
published on March 21, 2011

Company
Nexenta Systems, Inc.

Locations

• HQs: Santa Clara, CA
• Competency centers: Krasnodar and Saint Petersburg, Russia
• Offices: Almere, The Netherlands; The Woodlands, TX; NYC, NY; Boston, MA; Munich and Berlin, Germany; Seoul, Korea

Date founded
2005

Financial funding
Total equity funding at $30 million in three rounds: half million dollar in seed funding and then $6 million raised from investors in the U.S. and Europe (Javelin Venture Partners, FINAVES, Translink Capital); $21 million in series C in January 2012 in a round led by Menlo Ventures that also included Razor's Edge Ventures and Sierra Ventures.

Revenues
About $50 million a year corresponding to 10% in partner sales at around $500 million; revenue increased 385% from calendar 2009 to 2010 and 400% from 2010 to 2011; $1 billion planned in 2013 and $2 billion in 2014 in eco system to increase revenue at $100 million and $200 million respectively; positive cash flow in 4Q11; hopes to be profitable "sometimes beginning of next year, goal being an IPO in a couple of years".

Main executives

• Evan Powell, CEO: formerly founding CEO and then VP of marketing and business development at Clarus Systems; prior to that an early employee at ThinkLink, where he was director of business development; previously helped build Working Assets
• Alex Aizman, CTO and co-founder: co-creator of the iSCSI stack that was accepted into the Linux kernel, mid 2005, with Dmitry Yusupov (see below); both also built the hybrid operating system Nexenta Core Platform with an OpenSolaris kernel and a GNU (Ubuntu/Debian) user space; formerly director of software architecture at Neterion and director of software engineering at Silverback Systems (acquired by Brocade)
• Dmitry Yusupov, chief software architect, co-founder: previously also at Neterion and Silverback Systems
• Jon Ash, VP sales: most recently VP sales at Storwize and MaXXan
• Rick Hayes, VP technical ops: was principal consultant for the data center practice at GlassHouse Technologies and director of global services at MaXXan
• Brad Stone, VP product management: co-founder of MenloWare and CTO at Resonate
• Bill Roth, VP marketing: was chief marketing officer at LogLogic, VP and GP of the Tools Business Unit at BEA Systems; also at Sun Microsystems in product management and marketing for Java 2, Enterprise Edition
• Bill Fuller, VP engineering: had same position at Auspex and MonoSphere with stints at StorageWay, Nishan, Mendocino and Quest.
• Jim Fitzgerald, VP business development (replacing Jason Yoho): had stints as VP of sales and marketing at System Fabric Works, in IB storage solutions, and Global Bay Technologies; was  founder and CEO of SteelEye Technologies; prior to that at Sun Microsystems in a variety of sales and marketing position ultimately serving as SunSoft's senior director of business development

Note also Bill Moore, member of advisory board at Nexenta, co-creator of ZFS and co-founder of 3Par.

≠ of employees
230 including 90 people in R&D in Santa Clara, CA and 60 to 70 in Russia

Technology
NexentaStlor is based on OpenSolaris OS with a Debian/Ubuntu 'userland' the shell and the related command line tools,
with file system based on ZFS. Products built on top of this platform provide capabilities in managing multi-vendor environments, efficiencies in storage administration and management, and core storage capabilities for content management and compliance.

Products
Foundation for Nexenta products, NexentaStor is a NAS/SAN software platform, required for all other products. It features inline de-dupe, unlimited snapshots and cloning, unlimited file size, and HA support. Integrated with virtualization approaches, even in mixed vendor environment, it can create shared pools of storage from a combination of storage hardware, including SSDs, and delivers data integrity, integrated search, and inline virus scanning. It enables one-click virtual machine and other storage provisioning. NexentaStor is extended by the use of plug-ins, which broaden the platform's functionalities for specific storage systems, such as SAN.

Roadmap
NexentaSwitch (object storage drivers for OpenStack) this year, NS 5.0 (management layers updated), NMV 2.0 (new GUI) and NGCloud (enhancements for cloud) in 2013.

Prices
Entry level for 8TB with Silver support costs $1,725; up to $268,448 for 1PB with Platinum support

Technology partners
Abiquo, Avere Systems, Citrix, Coraid, DataON, Dell Compellent, Desktone, Emulex, High-Availability.Com, Indra Networks, Intel, LSI, Mezeo, MySQL, Netlist, Oracle/Sun, Stec, Supermicro, VMware

≠ of customers
4,500

Main customer
Korea Telecom (80PB deployed)

OEMs
Dell Compellent, SGI

Distribution partners
15% revenue in direct sales, 85% in indirect sales through 220 companies mostly VARs, biggest one being Thomas-Krenn AG in Germany

Competitors
EMC, NetApp, Nimble Storage, "not really Sun with higher prices"