Start-Up's Profile: nScaled

Company
nScaled Inc. (formerly LegalCloud)

Headquarters
Sausalito, CA

Born in
2008

Financial Funding
Funded by Acorn Fund, amount not disclosed

Revenues and profitability
Sales not disclosed; the company said to be cash flow positive

Main executives:

Mark Hadfield, CEO: Previously co-founder of Workshare, Inc. in the UK, he came to the USA to lead a market entry strategy from inception. Setting up offices in San Francisco and New York, he drove revenue to over $20 million in annual sales with over 6,000 customers including over 95% of the largest law firms worldwide. Workshare continues today with its document comparison solution having over 1,400 customers and 1.4 million end users. Hadfield originally hails from South Africa and earned his Bachelor of Commerce degree at University of Natal majoring in Economics and Marketing.
Kent Langley, CTO: He has architected and built some of the earliest dot-com communities at TechRepublic.com/CNET, worked for software companies like Autodesk, helped lead the development of new business lines at SolutionSet, and worked for cloud computing IaaS company Joyent.
Ilya Beyer, VP engineering: He is a specialist in data acquisition systems, real-time collaboration, content analysis, security and networking. As founding architect of NetDialog, he supported engineering through acquisition to Kana Communications in 2009 finishing as acting CTO. As VP of R&D for Workshare, he was responsible for the establishment of a new West-Coast development operation delivering on a new Data Leak Prevention (DLP) security enterprise suite. He has co-authored multiple patents in the areas of content analysis and content protection.

Number of employees
Less than 20

Activity
nScaled offers to replicate customers’ data center to the cloud for disaster recovery. It operates a network of physical infrastructure – in Dallas, TX, Ashburn, VA, London, UK, and Hong Kong – available to clients on an on-demand basis. Private cloud data centers operate as an extension to each customer’s existing primary data center facilities.

Technology
The start-up uses proprietary, open source and licensed technologies from third parties including Falconstor, VMWare, Certeon (WAN optimization) and Vyatta (routing and security software). The nScaled solution provides clients with distributed cloud infrastructure, available on-demand through its global network of SAS-70 data centers. All services are managed through a web based (Cloud Console) UI. The virtualization layer is VMWare. A 2U or 4U MicroPod Appliance with 3TB to 45TB of internal storage resides on-site (within the LAN) provides de-dupe, local recovery, WAN acceleration and two-way replication of workloads.

Products
Total Data Protection is a disaster recovery solution which provides for 15 minutes recovery of failed hosts, according to the company, using data center in the cloud.

Price
Per user (employee) for enterprise licensing of most services and per terabyte at $256/month. Active machines are priced per gigabyte of RAM starting at $125/month.

Roadmap
Different classes of storage and Platform as a Service offerings for industry appropriate solutions.

Distribution
Recently launched partner program with two Authorized Solution Providers (Keno Kozie Associates and Kraft Kennedy specialized in law and financial firms)

Number of customers
19 data centers currently supported for 10 customers

Main customers
Cooley LLP., Sequoia Capital, US Venture Partners, Leonard, Street and Deinard, Davis & Gilbert, and other legal and financial services firms.

Applications
Primary value proposition is to move data center to the cloud. nScaled provides a low risk path to the cloud by first replicating the entire data center for disaster recovery and improved recovery SLA’s. Subsequent applications include cost effective storage, primary services, QA and development environments on-demand, and entire primary data centers in the cloud.

Market
Targeting ‘risk intolerant industries’ which are traditional for enterprises with confidential data that are not willing to move to public clouds like Amazon EC2. Current customers are legal and financial service firms.

Among competitors

In public cloud: Amazon EC2, GoGrid
In traditional co-location: SunGard, LexisNexis
In disaster recovery: Double-Take, i365