Start-Up’s Profile: Scality

Company
Scality (formerly BizangaStore)
Name "synonymous with extremely scalable, sustainable and high performance software storage solutions", said co-founder Serge Dugas

Headquarters
Paris, France, and offices in SF, CA and Tokyo, Japan

Born in
February 2010
The company was founded by the same people that created Bizanga in 2003 at the origin of Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for anti-abuse protection. But it became a commodity product, sold to Cloudmark, a firm involved in carrier-grade messaging infrastructure and security solutions, for around $30 million in February 2010. Bizanga then was obliged to get a new name, BizangaStore and then Scality, and changed completely it business model to enter into storage software for the email market and for the same customers as it appears that they needed a less costly storage platform than EMC, HDS, NetApp and others behind MTA.

Financial Funding
In the funding round, management and employees invested US $1.3 million, with 85% of employees electing to invest. The start-up completes $5 million in Series A funding in June 2010 from Credit Agricole Private Equity, French VC and Galileo. CEO Jérôme Lecat told us that he expects a new financial round between $5 million and $10 million in the next 18 months  .

Revenues and profitability
Sales were not disclosed and Scality expects to be profitable in 2012.

Main executives and founders

• Jérôme Lecat, CEO: 44 years old, he co-founded and was CEO of Internet Way in 1994, acquired by UUNET in 1997. Since 1998, he has been active as a business angel, joining boards of VC-backed companies, including Data Center Technology, a backup appliance start-up, Dedigate, a value-added hosting company, and Vision Objects, in handwriting recognition. As interim CEO, he turned around Zencod and merged it with Net Secure Software, now known as Net Secure One.
• Giorgio Regni, CTO: A veteran of open source and commercial development projects, his expertise ranges from open-source content management system to designing and implementing a POS system for restaurants.
• Serge Dugas, chief sales and marketing officer: He has more than 20 years of experience in international telecommunications and financial services industries. He served in a global financial services marketing role at Sun in Palo Alto, CA, and in a sales management role in its AsiaPac operation.
• Daniel Binsfeld, VP customer services: He began his career at Internet Way in 1995 as a network engineer and managed the company’s customer services until the merger with UUNet in 1997. From 2003 to 2005, he co-built a company seeded by EDF, Fludia, that specializes in the collection and analysis of power consumption data. He then helped B3G Telecom, provider of IP Centrex services in France, grow in its operations and engineering before joining Bizanga in March 2007.
• Bradley King, director customer architecture and partnerships: With Schlumberger research lab in Paris for several years, he joined Bizanga labs in 2008.
• Hugues Lisan, CFO: Not a founder, he was a seasoned CFO with nearly 25 years of experience in various high tech companies such as Olivetti, Unisys, Interphase and Hummingbird Communications.
• Erik Julin, US customer solution architect: He is not a founder and was recently recruited. He is a 15-year veteran in the messaging service provider and storage infrastructure business, having held technology, customer architecture and operations roles at EMC, Openwave, 724 Solutions and SurfKitchen.

Number of employees
26 including 5 in USA and 2 in Japan

Technology
Developed since 2008, RING is a patent-pending software technology designed to store up to 12PB of unstructured data and unrelated content for millions of users. In addition, it eliminates the overhead of volume management and capacity planning – while providing automatic load balancing, automatic tiering, geo-redundancy and online compression. It does fundamentally three operations: Get, Put, and Delete.

                                           Ring for Email Architecture

At the heart lies a Distributed Hash Table algorithm to consistently map a particular key to a set of storage nodes. Distributed hash tables (DHTs) are a class of decentralized distributed systems that provide a lookup service similar to a hash table: (key, value) pairs are stored in the DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows DHTs to scale to large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
Accessors are software API’s that communicate with application and enable storage virtualization. Scality supports multiple accessors – native REST HTTP, NFS, BRS2 and Zimbra. Using the BRS2, (Amazon S3 compatible API), hosting companies and service providers can deploy cloud storage services similar to S3.
Scality IO Daemon is a scalable software dedicated to efficiently store data to disk and to insulate applications from hardware failures. If a controller dies or a disk is failing, only the IO Daemon is impacted and application performance from the remaining disks remains unaffected.
Scality has developed storage connectors for Zimbra and Cyrus.
RING can accept up to 1,000 nodes, each one being a server with 10-to-50TB HDDs (SAS for Tier 1), connected via 1Gb or 10GbE. Each object is identified with a 160-bit key. For protection, conventional RAID is not used. Each record is duplicated up to five times on several nodes. "RAID-5 is not sufficient for disk drives at more than 1TB. The error rate is too high. Even RAID-5 is not sufficient and the risk and the time to rebuild it is too high", said Giorgio Regni.

Products
Storage software platform for email messaging

Price
Not revealed but based on gigabytes stored

Roadmap
Adding email de-dupe on files (not blocks) as well as replication on a second data center

Number of customers
5

Main customers
Telenet and then German hosting companies Host Europe, Dunkel, intergenia, Open-Xchange and ScaleUp.

Competitors
Zimbra for messaging service, big firms like EMC, HDS an NetApp for storage and also smaller ones like Caringo and Parascale