Stealthy Start-Up Nevex Virtual Technologies

Currently in stealth mode, start-up Nevex Virtual Technologies is a Toronto, Canada-based developer of Windows application acceleration software for servers.

It was founded in July 2009 by University of Toronto engineering graduates and long-time business partners, Steven Lamb, CEO, and Rayan Zachariassen, CTO. This is the fourth software start-up for Lamb, including Border Network Technologies (founded with Zachariassen) acquired by Secure Computing in 1996 for $190 million, Inex by InfoSpace and Nevex Software by Baltimore Technologies in 2000 for $42 million.

Note a big name in the storage industry as board’s member since December 2010: Geoff Barrall, CTO of Overland and formerly one of the founders of BlueArc and Data Robotics.

Nevex has developed a software solution to solve the problem of poor application performance caused by storage bottlenecks on local or remote devices found with I/O bound applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Hyper-V. This solution extends Windows using a data placement engine to manage the flow of data – transparently unlocking SSD performance and with no application changes.

It manages a small SSD on the server to cache current and alleviates the I/O bottleneck by seamlessly replicating or relocating active data to flash media, allowing inactive data to remain on lower cost HDDs.

This technology allows storage processing performance to catch up to server processing capability, while reducing the workload on network and storage devices by redirecting I/O to a local cache/tier. In resolving these performance issues and embracing the shift from HDDs to SSDs, it’s an application-acceleration software for mid to large organizations.

Other start-ups in caching software include FlashSoft, Nvelo, VeloBit. Another one, IO Turbine, was recently acquired by Fusion-io for $95 million.