Start-Up’s Profile: Virsto Software

Company:
Virsto Software

Headquarters:
Sunnyvale, CA

Born in:
2007

Funding:
Series A of $8.25 million from August Capital and Canaan Partners in 2009

Main executives:

• Mark Davis, CEO and co-founder: launched the first FC disk array in 1994, and was instrumental in growing Sun to a large Unix storage vendor within five years; repositioned ConvergeNet from being yet another RAID vendor to SAN-based storage virtualization, leading directly to Dell’s purchase of the company for $340 million; instrumental in the IPO of professional services software vendor Evolve Software; most recently CEO of SRM vendor Creekpath Systems, where he engineered the acquisition for $10 million in 2006 by Opsware (bought by HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion)).
• Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO and co-founder: joined Veritas in the early 1990s, focusing on innovations ranging from the Veritas File System and the Veritas Database Edition for Oracle, one of the first storage software appliance technology and early explorations of a then-nascent virtualization technology called Xen; after Veritas, was VP of engineering and CTO of digital archiving provider PowerFile, then served as CTO at backup software vendor Acronis.
• Serge Pashenkov, VP of engineering and co-founder: hired the engineering team at PowerFile, led the design, and managed delivery of three major releases of on-spec and on-time system software for an archive appliance; worked on advanced technology teams at Veritas and also ran engineering for the industry’s first software-only NAS platform.
• Rafael Santini, VP sales: most recently with Citrix where he joined through the $500 million acquisition of XenSource, where he built a network of 150 resellers that delivered 400 customers in the company’s first year of sales; prior to XenSource, was a significant factor in Marimba’s IPO and acquisition by BMC, and also a contributor to Compuware’s acquisition of EcoSystems, and Demax Software’s purchase by OpenVision (now Symantec).

Advisors:
They include:

• Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Data Robotics and former Brocade’s VP WW marketing
• Frank Slootman, president, Backup Recovery Systems, EMC
• Fred van den Bosch, CEO of Librato, former CTO of Veritas Software

Number of employees:
18

Technology:
Virsto One, launched last February, is a hypervisor-based storage solution. Supporting Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, it is architected to be storage- and hypervisor-agnostic with the goal to:

• Reducing storage sprawl: cutting VM image space consumption by up to 90% through unlimited high-performance, thin provisioned, VM-optimized snapshots and clones.
• Simplifying storage management: enabling automatic VM storage provisioning, clone creation and off-host snapshot backup.
• Increasing storage performance: providing VM-optimized flow control to eliminate the performance-sapping I/O blender, potentially more than doubling I/O rates.
• Eliminating excessive storage costs: by reducing the number of HDDs required for VM application support and reducing the operating expense of VM storage management.

Virsto One is delivered as a plug-in to Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. The 10MB software, installed inside the Hyper-V parent partition, places a filter driver between VMs virtual hard drives (VHDs) and physical volumes.

    
There are three main components in the Virsto One
        architecture: the service, filter driver and VHD.

Pricing:
Virsto One is licensed per server, starting at $1,250 per two-sockets physical server, $2,500 per four-socket, and $5,000 for unlimited sockets.
    
Customers:
Beta testers were SMBs, departmental enterprise customers, application hosters and Microsoft Gold partners.

Market:
Organizations with server virtualization using Hyper-V

Roadmap:
To adapt the software to other virtualization platforms