Out of Stealth Mode, Cirtas Unveiled Cloud Storage Controller With WAN Optimization

Here are threes press releases published by Cirtas at the same time:

Cirtas Systems Completes $10 Million Series A Funding Round With NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Amazon

Cirtas Systems, a company to making cloud storage work like onsite enterprise storage arrays, has closed a Series A funding round totaling $10 million with NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Amazon.

The investment news comes concurrent with Cirtas’ emergence from stealth mode, as the company unveiled its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller solution for medium to large enterprises and announced the product’s general availability.  Amazon joins Cirtas backers NEA and Lightspeed, forming an investment team that is both committed to and capable of backing Cirtas through rapid expansion. With its product already in production, the company will now apply its funding capital to infrastructure investments that support the accelerated development and adoption of its Bluejet technology, including acquisition of top engineering talent and scaling of its marketing, sales and customer deployment teams.

“It is with great pleasure that we announce our Series A funding round with investments from NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners – two of Silicon Valley’s most respected high tech venture capital firms – and Amazon, the world’s leading cloud services and storage provider,” said Dan Decasper, co-founder and CEO of Cirtas Systems. “Their combined support has enabled us to solve complex security, performance, and compatibility issues that have previously prevented mainstream adoption of cloud storage for general IT purposes. Our Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller solution is truly enterprise class and the quality and commitment of our investors speaks volumes about its market potential.“

With Bluejet, Cirtas puts the promise of the cloud within reach for enterprise organizations, addressing the lingering barriers and rigorous IT standards that have hindered mainstream adoption of cloud storage. Uniting WAN optimization techniques with advanced storage array virtualization capabilities, Cirtas has delivered the world’s first cloud-enabled enterprise storage system.

“Amazon believes that the cloud service model gives businesses more options and better control over how they purchase data storage. The enterprise is an important market segment for the Amazon S3 cloud storage platform, and Cirtas’ focus on optimizing cloud storage for the enterprise is tightly aligned with our own. We expect Cirtas to have a positive, lasting impact on our ability to serve our joint customers in this market segment,” said Jeff Blackburn, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Amazon. “After thorough diligence on the space, what impressed us about Cirtas is the unique value proposition for the enterprise that its technology delivers—it makes the process of migrating and managing large quantities of data in the cloud fast, secure, and very cost effective.”

“NEA is proud to work with some of the world’s most visionary entrepreneurs and business leaders to create truly transformational companies. We strive to stay ahead of the curve by identifying market needs and technology trends that will ultimately yield rapid growth and create large markets,” said Kittu Kolluri, general partner for NEA and a Cirtas investor. “With its strong leadership team and groundbreaking Bluejet technology, Cirtas is exemplary of the kinds of organizations in which we look to invest. We are pleased to support Cirtas in its singular vision to make cloud storage safe, manageable and accessible for the enterprise.”

“Lightspeed is focused on identifying leading edge technologies and partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs to build high growth, category leading companies,” said Barry Eggers, managing director for Lightspeed Venture Partners and a Cirtas investor. “Our decision to invest in Cirtas was based on our belief that its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller solution represents a seismic shift – not just in cloud storage, but in the data storage market as a whole. We look forward to supporting Cirtas as they deliver their revolutionary approach to helping enterprise organizations leverage the benefits of cloud storage.”  

Cirtas Systems Unveils
Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers for the Enterprise
Makes Cloud Storage a Viable Enterprise Solution
for the First Time

Cirtas Systems emerged from stealth to publically unveil its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers after completion of a beta program with more than a dozen enterprise customers across diverse markets.

Cirtas Bluejet technology unites proven WAN optimization techniques with advanced virtualized storage array capabilities to deliver the world’s first cloud-enabled storage system. The solution goes beyond simply opening a gateway to the cloud to actually harness and control it, analogous to the way enterprise storage array controllers manage the shelves of attached disk drives. Cirtas has secured strategic alliances with leading cloud storage providers, including Amazon (a Series A investor in the company) and Iron Mountain, among others, which enables its users to mix and match services across cloud storage platforms to create hybrid solutions that are tailored to their specific needs.

“Iron Mountain’s Archive Services Platform was designed to meet the needs of independent software vendors looking to integrate secure cloud storage and cloud information management functionality into their solution,” said Jaimin Patel, director of developer programs for Iron Mountain. “Cirtas Bluejet makes migrating data to the cloud fast and painless, and perfectly complements our portfolio of cloud storage and information management services. Together, Cirtas and Iron Mountain offer enterprise customers an integrated cloud solution that is easy to implement and manage, while ensuring stored information is accessible and secure.”

Bluejet’s market potential has already received some early validation: the company received its first purchase order from beta-user-turned-customer Robert Half International, prior to the product’s general market availability.

Making Cloud Storage Viable for the Enterprise
Cirtas’ Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller technology addresses IT administrator concerns about cloud storage and bridges the gap between the ROI promise of the cloud and stringent enterprise IT requirements. Despite the many potential benefits of cloud storage – massive cost savings, increased accessibility and manageability – it has been faced with skepticism from many IT managers. Until Cirtas Cloud Storage Controller technology was developed, concerns over security, compatibility, availability, performance, cloud storage provider lock-in, and verifiable reductions in total cost of ownership (TCO) had yet to be addressed by vendors in a meaningful way, deterring enterprise adoption.

“Public cloud storage has many attractive attributes – no hardware or software to buy or manage, the ability to scale up or down on-demand, and inexpensive pricing – but it isn’t without its challenges: security, application compatibility, and performance to name only a few,” said Adam Couture, research director at Gartner. “Cloud storage controller technology addresses much of the functionality needed to utilize cloud storage in a manner consistent with on-site storage. Hybrid cloud storage models – on-premise controllers combined with public cloud storage – can deliver capabilities not possible with on-site storage such as the ability to easily move data from one service provider to another to attain better pricing.”

Cirtas’ approach to cloud storage addresses challenges inherent to physical storage solutions, making capacity growth, backup, and disaster recovery issues a thing of the past. Bluejet is an enterprise ready solution that makes public cloud storage work like onsite storage arrays, but ups the ante with increased security, performance, manageability, and cost savings over its legacy counterparts.

“Advanced WAN optimization techniques are at the core of our Bluejet technology, and key to how Cirtas delivers substantially lowered storage total cost of ownership,” said Josh Goldstein, vice president of marketing and product management at Cirtas Systems. “These techniques combined with several others are what elevate Bluejet from a simple cloud gateway device to a Cloud Storage Controller that is truly enterprise class. Without the power they provide, IT departments can’t always demonstrate true TCO reductions with cloud storage and performance won’t be sufficient to make the end-user experience transparent.”

Key technology features and benefits
of Cirtas Bluejet include:

• CloudLock Data Security: Securely encrypts all data in transit to and at rest in the cloud, ensuring only authorized users have access to stored information. Even if a security breach occurs at the cloud provider level, Bluejet’s CloudLock Data Security prevents data from being read or used. Administrators can define which servers and users are allowed to access information.
• CloudCache and CloudReduce: CloudCache is a high-speed, automated tiered cache spanning RAM, SSD, and spinning disk to accelerate the end-user experience, and improve performance by keeping frequently accessed data on the Bluejet appliance to reduce the need for data retrieval from the cloud. CloudReduce provides reduction technology that de-duplicates and compresses data prior to transmission to the cloud. Together, CloudReduce and CloudCache increase the speed of data transfers both to and from the cloud, while actively reducing associated service fees.
• CloudSnap: Provides users with unlimited, fully automated and space-efficient snapshots of data stored in the cloud, enabling easy recovery from user and application errors; eliminates the need to perform separate backups of primary data stored on Bluejet.
• CloudConnect: Facilitates use of multiple cloud providers, making it simple to spread data across multiple cloud platforms and eliminating the need to re-write applications to proprietary cloud storage APIs.  Provides a standard iSCSI interface to servers.
• CloudForecast: Built in return-on-investment (ROI) calculator provides on-demand insights into cloud storage costs on a volume-by-volume basis, with real time, ‘ROI-on-the-fly’ reporting for chargeback accounting.
• Virtualized Storage Array Capabilities: Thin provisioning, automated tiered storage, primary storage deduplication, data encryption, snapshots and more.
• Increased Performance: Suitable as a primary storage replacement for Tier2/Tier3 applications, as well as for secondary storage and archive applications. Drives up to 1Gbps to the cloud.
• Enterprise Grade, Redundant Components: Includes journaled write paths, built in RAID protection for cached data and high-performance appliance design.
• Rapid Deployment: Cirtas Bluejet is easy to setup and is customer installable; beta users overwhelmingly reported 60 minutes or less to deploy – from unpacking the system to provisioning storage to their hosts and writing/reading data.

Pricing and Availability
Starting at $69,995 per appliance, Cirtas Bluejet is available for immediate purchase from Bear Data Systems, Bedrock Technology Partners, Custom Storage, Daymark Solutions, En Pointe Technologies, Extend Networks, Inc., Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), Curvature, Nexus Information Systems, NuSpective Solutions, Saturn Business Systems, Inc., Syscom Technologies, Technology Integration Group, and Trace3, with additional value added resellers to be named soon.
 
 
Cirtas Systems Invites Enterprises to Take Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers for a Test Flight at No Cost
Evaluation Program of Enterprise-ready Hybrid Cloud Storage Technology for 60 Days

Cirtas Systems revealed a risk-free evaluation program that encourages qualified businesses to test its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller solution for 60 days in their own data centers, free of charge.

“IT managers are being asked to find ways to lower the cost of their storage environments. With our risk-free evaluation program, Cirtas is helping customers get the time they need to experience the real world ease-of-use, capabilities, performance, utility, and cost savings of Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers. It’s a great way to learn about the benefits Bluejet brings to the table without any out-of-pocket expenses,” said Josh Goldstein, vice president of marketing and product management for Cirtas Systems. “We’re confident that Bluejet will deliver the most powerful, functional, and cost-effective enterprise-ready hybrid storage solution – or your money back.”

Details of Risk-Free 60-Day Bluejet Evaluation Program:

• Qualified businesses will receive one Cirtas Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller to evaluate for sixty days
• Businesses have the opportunity to ship the unit back at any time
• Cirtas will pay the fees accrued from their chosen third party cloud storage provider(s) over the trial period

Bluejet Pricing and Availability
Cirtas Bluejet pricing starts at $69,995 per appliance and is available for purchase from Cirtas channel partners.

Read also:
Start-Up’s Profile: Cirtas Systems
In stealth mode preparing an appliance for cloud storage