Start-Up's Profile: StorSimple

storsimple_startup_profile

Founded in: 2009

Location: Santa Clara CA

Funding: The privately-held company is backed by Redpoint Ventures and Index Ventures, and the two founders got a lot of money by selling their company at high price (see below).

Executives: The two founders have a great background. CEO Ursheet Parikh was formerly director of product management for Cisco’s WAN optimization and application acceleration business unit, an advanced technology unit that produced the Wide Area Application Service (WAAS) product. He came into Cisco in 2002 through the expansive acquisition of Andiamo – $750 million in 2004 after an investment of more than $80 million of Cisco into the start-up -, a SAN multiprotocol switching start-up. Prior to that, he held positions at Kuokoa Networks, in file system virtualization, and Jalva Media, a digital asset management software and outsourcing company. The other founder is storage veteran Guru Pangal, a top executive from Brocade where he was VP and GM for the foundry application delivery controller and the files business. He came to Brocade through the acquisition of Rhapsody Networks for $75 million, also in 2002. The technical staff includes Maurilio Cometto, also formerly at Andiamo, Joel Christner from Cisco, Steve Wolfe, a founding member of NuView acquired by Brocade in 2006, Gautam Gopinadhan at Sun and then Cisco, and Rich Testardi, a founder of Incipient previously system architect and software engineer at EMC where he was in charge of developing EMC PowerPath (storage multi-pathing software) and the Hazard Test Suite used by industry vendors for FC solution testing. Testardi came to EMC in 1998 through the acquisition of Conley, in storage management software for Unix and NT.

Products: StorSimple is in stealth mode. The goal of the start-up is to "provide the experience of primary storage with the business and operational benefits of cloud-based storage." Its technology is supposed to resolve several problems of storage cloud providers: capacity planning, storage provisioning, data center space, power, cooling, data backup, replacing failed drives, and tape management.

Market: Cloud storage

Our opinion: With a great team like that, we look forward at an innovative cloud storage solution from this start-up.