Start-Up’s Profile: Pancetera Software

Company
Pancetera Software, Inc.

Headquarters
Santa Clara, CA; and office in Germany

Date founded
2008

Financial funding
$5 million in first round from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and ONSET Ventures in 2010, according to several U.S. sources  

Main executives

• Henrik Rosendahl, CEO: joined from VMware where he served as director of application virtualization; was CEO of Thinstall acquired by VMware.
• Bart Bartlett, VP marketing, co-founder: spent five years with Data Domain (bought by EMC) in sales and marketing; previously held same roles at SGI, BlueArc, MarketFirst, Meridian Data (acquired by Quantum and now part of Overland), IBM Informix and Trimble Navigation.
• Mitch Haile, CTO and VP product management, co-founder: was an early engineer at Data Domain where he led the System Management group for four years.
• Peter Jensen, VP of sales: formerly VP sales and marketing at Rymin; priorin sales at FastScale Technology, VMware and Thinstall; spent thirteen years at Oracle and four years at Symantec in sales and product marketing.
• Greg Wade, VP engineering, co-founder: was also an early engineer at Data Domain after being director of engineering at Resonate; was formerly an early employee at Legato (sold to EMC).

Members of advisory board

• Geoff Barrall, CTO and VP of engineering for Overland: after serving as CEO of Data Robotics; before that founded five companies, including BlueArc
• Matt Jacobs, sales director at Nimble Storage: prior that was the launch sales person at Data Domain; previously worked at BlueArc and Meridian Data
• Kai Li: co-founded Data Domain in 2001
• Robert Lyon: co-founded Legato in 1988 with three co-workers from Sun

Number of employees
22

Technology
Supporting VMware ESX 3.5 and 4.x, Pancetera Unite’s virtual appliance resides on a single host, integrates with physical server data protection technologies and expands their capabilities into virtual environments by accelerating I/O and streamlining performance. Backup clients include HP Data Protector, IBM Tivoli, EMC/Legato Networker and VMware VCB. For VM replication, it works with Riverbed and Data Domain appliances.

It is based on three technologies:
SmartRead: It accelerates data protection and maintenance tasks of virtual machines such as backup, replication and migration from 100 to 800%, according to the company. By only reading the data in use at the time of the data access, SmartRead, reduces the storage impact these operations have on the network. Replication products or backup agents receive a data stream from SmartRead, which is scrubbed clean of random data – this increases WAN throughput, compression and even de-dupe activities that occur after reading the virtual machine from Pancetera.
SmartMotion: It simplifies the process of moving VMs and reduces the time required to copy, move, or replicate virtual machines from hours to minutes – whether being moved to the same or a different type of storage environment. It also optimizes the VM image and transmits only changed blocks for updated VMs – minimizing server, network and storage resources across the board. This also contributes to faster backups, migrations and replications of VMs across a LAN or in a cloud environment.
SmartView: It provides a single view of all virtual machines, and their disk drives, in a single network-attached file system that can be mounted on any Windows or Unix system using CIFS or NFS. VMs appear regardless of what type of storage they reside on or whether they are running, suspended or powered down and it is possible to mix and match vCenter and non-vCenter hosts, piece together local and remote hosts into a single place to browse, copy, backup or replicate VMs. SmartView allows the flexibility to group VMs by hypervisor, vCenter group or create groups to organize the VMs for backup or replication tasks. SmartView automatically updates when you create, delete, migrate or vMotion a VM so that the environment is complete and up-to-date in real-time. Since SmartView is presented as a CIFS or NFS share, it is possible to continue to use all standard tools that work with directories and files with no specific VMware knowledge.

Released date
Latest product edition, Pancetera Unite 2.1, on January 31, 2011

Price
$995 per hypervisor socket

Roadmap
To extend to other hypervisors (Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xenserver)

Partners
Technology partnership with CommVault, IBM Tivoli, Riverbed (for WAN optimization) and VMware.

Distributors and OEMs
Mainly VMware-focused resellers; i365 only known OEM

Known customers
California Emergency Management Agency (with IBM), Rex Healthcare, Townsend & Townsend

Applications
DR, replication, VM backup, storage management in virtualized environments

Among competitors
PHD Virtual Technologies, Symantec, Veeam Software and Vizioncore/Quest Software