Sundance Looks to StorSimple

StorSimple, Inc. takes an approach to storage design, betting early on the
Windows Azure platform and assembling a team to make
cloud-integrated storage a reality for enterprise companies.

StorSimple’s breakthrough began with a
fundamental observation followed by a simple question.

"Enterprises store a
monumental amount of data every year, but up to 80 percent of that data is
never or only rarely accessed," says Ursheet Parikh, CEO and
co-founder of StorSimple. "We
wondered what kind of storage system would accommodate enterprises’ actual data
access requirements most effectively? That
question drove our design goals."

Traditional storage is expensive. The inherent fragility of disk drives means
that storage products wear out faster than other IT products, leading to high
maintenance and replacement costs. Cloud storage shifts those costs and the
technology refresh cycle to the cloud service provider, reducing
costs to enterprise companies.

"Cloud storage products
are hard to build, and few manufacturers create enterprise-level products,"
Parikh says. "Existing storage
providers, the ones with the most expertise, had the least incentive to create
cloud-based competition for their own incumbent business model. As an
unencumbered startup, we had an opportunity to approach the problem from a new
perspective, combining the established with the new."

StorSimple Takes Off Quickly In 2009
Parikh created a business plan for an
enterprise-level storage company that he started presenting to Silicon Valley
venture capital (VC) firms, in search of funding. Unbeknownst to Parikh,
storage industry expert Guru Pangal, a pioneer in the early development of FC
and SCSI technologies, was shopping around a
similar business plan at the same time.

"The VC we both approached suggested
Guru and I meet; we connected and we got along well, so we joined forces,"
Parikh says. "Within a week of our
first joint VC meetings, we had term sheets in hand for funding StorSimple."

StorSimple’s cloud-integrated enterprise storage approach
found traction with organizations worldwide because it combines cloud capabilities in a more secure and transparent manner. Within a couple
years of launch, StorSimple was providing cloud-integrated storage solutions
for customers, including a large number of Fortune 1000 companies.

"Enterprises using
StorSimple products find their storage costs plummeting, often by 60 percent to
80 percent compared with strictly on-premise storage," Parikh says.
"We let enterprises treat their data
differently depending on the frequency of access required."

Rapid customer traction has enabled StorSimple to grow quickly. Its more than
50 team members thrive in a company culture Parikh describes as based on
intellectual honesty, accountability and passion: "We have a great team here that creates solid products that solve real
customer problems."

Taking Advantage of the Full Range
of BizSpark Programs
Soon after
StorSimple’s founding, one of the company’s board members introduced the two
founders to a local Microsoft BizSpark director. In 2009 StorSimple joined the
BizSpark program, in spring of 2010 the company became a member, and in June
2011 StorSimple was recognized as the 2011 Microsoft BizSpark Partner of the
Year.

In announcing that award, Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president for
Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft, says: "StorSimple has leveraged the full range of
the BizSpark program’s offering, from world-class development tools to a global
network of partners and customers. As a result, it has accelerated its business
opportunity and increased its market presence while adding value for its
investors."

"The BizSpark program has been an
important component of StorSimple’s rapid success," Parikh says.
"The association with Microsoft gave
us instant credibility and exposure, and we’ve been able to achieve faster
joint customer success than would have been expected for a startup. We work
well on core issues, such as sales alignment and compensation alignment, that
could be onerous without such close cooperation."

The BizSpark connection also enabled StorSimple to discover more about
Microsoft’s emphasis on and commitment to the Windows Azure cloud platform –
and it opened the door to Microsoft’s inclusion of StorSimple demos as part of
its Microsoft Technology Center programs.

"I think Microsoft should
get lot of credit for how they’re executing, especially for their cloud
offerings," Parikh says.

StorSimple Advantages in Action
StorSimple’s growing list of awards
and testimonials attests to the effectiveness of its
cloud-integrated enterprise storage solutions.

One StorSimple customer is the Sundance Institute, the nonprofit
organization that runs the annual Sundance Film Festival as its most visible
offering. The Sundance Institute’s need for storage capacity was growing faster
than the organization’s existing SAN and DAS support.

"Now that anyone can run
out and shoot HD video, we were ending up with gigabytes and gigabytes of film
content needing storage," says Justin Simmons, associate director of
Technology Services for the Sundance Institute. "StorSimple has freed up a lot of resources on our existing storage,
so we are able to delay or potentially entirely put off what would have
been a very expensive new SAN purchase."

Justin Simmons, Sundance Institute
Compounding this ongoing challenge, during the months of the Sundance Film
Festival, the institute’s staff doubles, festival logistics ramp up to support
the 40,000 attendees, and the small IT staff has to scale quickly to
support the expanded user community and the increased storage demands.

"We were looking for a
new storage solution with on-premise storage and easy locations that also had a
cloud tier, and when I heard it could really be done within one box with
StorSimple, we recognized what a huge time and cost saver it would be for us,"
Simmons says.

The Sundance Institute moved all its unstructured file storage to
the StorSimple Solution. The impact was immediate: StorSimple’s de-duplication
capabilities eliminated the Sundance Institute’s need for tape backup as it
moved to the cloud. The institute also appreciated StorSimple’s certification
and operation with VMware and with its Microsoft products already in place,
including Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint, as well as the fact that
StorSimple helps ensure the security of data residing in a public cloud by
encrypting data in flight and at rest.

"StorSimple has freed up
a lot of resources on our existing storage, so we are able to delay or
potentially entirely put off what would have been a very expensive new SAN
purchase," Simmons says. "And
instead of spending potentially half her time managing backups, our system
administrator is no longer buried under a backup storage shell game. With
StorSimple backing up straight to the cloud, she can now use her time to work
on new projects and new initiatives for the Sundance Institute."