Start-Up’s Profile: Gridstore

Company:
Gridstore, Inc.

Headquarters and offices:
HQ in Palo Alto, CA and development facilities in Dublin, Ireland.

Born in:
January 2007

Investors:
Iona Technologies, acquired by Progress Software in June 2008, whom co-founder Chris Horn is chairman of Gridstore; others investors include software firm Norkom, Antoni Sawicki, Thomasz Nowak, as well as Enterprise Ireland.

Customers:
Managed service providers, SMBs, VARs, OEMs.

Main executives with their background:

• Kelly Murphy, co-founder and CEO, founded in 1998 Marrakech, an on-demand software company offering on-demand procurement and supply chain systems, and that raised over $75 million in venture capital and then was sold June 2006 to AMT-Sybex.
• Antoni Sawicki, co-founder and VP of product development, also comes from Marrakech (finally sold to one of its investors, AMT Sybex, in June 2006).

Technology:

    
NASg combines many devices
    into a shared storage platform
Gridstore NASg consolidates distributed NAS islands into an enterprise storage grid. The software combines the storage resources from any number of off-the-shelf NAS (storage nodes) into a shared storage pool designed for primary storage. This allows an unlimited number of storage nodes to be added to the pool over time. A NASg volume appears as a standard Microsoft network drive to clients of the grid. The cornerstone of NASg is Storage Block, an Intel/Microsoft-based storage node that features embedded Windows XP, an Intel Atom core, 1GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of SATA hard disk drives.

Pricing:
NASg storage platform begins at $800 with individual expansion nodes starting from $300 to $400.

Roadmap:
Unix and Linux capabilities will be added to today’s XP Windows-based NAS technology, and also the use of cloud to offer replication.