In Stealth Mode, Start-Up Virsto Software new Actor in Server Virtualization and Storage Management

Today, we have few information on the product coming from start-up Virsto Software, based in Mountain View CA. In the coming months, it will reveal a “software to unleash the power of virtual storage for virtual servers.” “Virsto Software lives at the intersection of server virtualization and storage management.” That’s all.

But its management is impressive:

CEO Mark Davis launched the first FC disk array in 1994, and was instrumental in growing Sun from a non-player to a large storage vendor within 5 years. After a stint as marketing VP at venerable industry icon StorageTek, he repositioned ConvergeNet from being yet another RAID vendor to becoming the inventor of SAN-based storage virtualization, leading directly to Dell’s purchase of the company for $340million in 1999. After an instrumental role in the IPO of professional services software vendor Evolve Software, he returned to the storage industry, working on multiple virtualization projects. Before starting Virsto, he was CEO of storage resource management vendor Creekpath Systems, where he engineered an acquisition in 2006 by Opsware (bought by HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion).

Co-founder and CTO Alex Miroshnichenko
was at the center of innovation in virtualization and storage dates from the early 1990s, when he joined a tiny company of storage pioneers called Veritas Software. He was at the origin of Veritas File System, Veritas Database Edition for Oracle, the first viable storage software appliance technology, and a then-nascent virtualization technology called Xen. Alex was one of the backbone engineers as Veritas (now Symantec) that grew from an inconsequential startup to a $2 billion giant. After Veritas, Miroshnichenko became VP of engineering and CTO for a digital archiving system at PowerFile, and served as CTO at backup software vendor Acronis.

Co-founder and VP Engineering Serge Pashenkov most recently did it at PowerFile, where he hired the team, led the design, and managed delivery of three major releases of on-spec and on-time system software for a data archive appliance. He also innovated at Veritas Software, where his technology teams delivered a patented fault tolerant software platform, a content aware storage system, and new levels of application scalability for modular computing. Also at Veritas, he ran engineering for the industry’s first software-only NAS platform. Pashenkov is a veteran of several other startups in the storage, networking, and telephony industries.