Irish Start-Up Gridstore Gains Momentum

Gridstore, in enterprise-class Network Attached Storage grid (NASg) solutions, has gained momentum as demand for the company’s scale-out NAS offering fuels growth in the SMB and managed service provider (MSP) markets.

The company’s grid architecture eliminates the risk, cost and complexity of traditional siloed storage solutions, combining the simplicity, convenience and affordability of NAS with the scalability, performance and reliability of enterprise-class storage. Gridstore delivers a grid-based architecture that reduces the cost of storage and makes scale out NAS available to the SMB market.

Since announcing the general availability of the Gridstore NASg solution in Q2, 2010, the company has announced a number of milestones:

• The company has partnered with solutions distribution leader Avnet Technology Solutions to integrate Gridstore technology on Avnet storage hardware to deliver NASg powered storage nodes for SMB and MSP environments that centralizes the sharing and management of massive amounts of NAS-stored files
• Closed a $2 million seed funding round led by NCB Ventures; Enterprise Ireland and private investors
• Gained market traction in the education vertical and secured key MSP partners
• Won a ‘Best in Show’ award in the ‘Best SMB Solution’ category at TMC’s ITEXPO West 2010

The NASg solution employs a grid architecture, virtualization, and I/O to build a cost-effective, file-based storage solution that enables SMBs and MSPs to create storage pools that centralize sharing and management of massive amounts of network attached storage (NAS) files. The benefits of this approach include unlimited storage capacity, network bandwidth, processing capability and reliability.

"We realized the time had come to completely rethink how NAS storage is architected and managed," said Kelly Murphy, CEO, Gridstore. "Existing solutions are too limited in scope to deal with rapidly increasing data requirements, are plagued with network bottlenecks, don’t offer enough processing capacity, and are complex and costly to manage. By virtualizing storage nodes and harnessing the parallel processing and I/O of a grid, we are able to eliminate these problems and bring a new level of scale, performance, reliability, simplicity and affordability that delivers immediate ROI for our customers and partners."