Start-Up’s Profile: Cache IQ

Company
Cache IQ, Inc.

HQs
Austin, TX

Founded in
May 2010

Acquisition
Storspeed in file caching solution in July 2010

Financial Funding:
$6 million from 27 individual angel investors

Main Executives

• Joel Trammell, CEO: co-founded NetQoS in 1999 in application-centric network management, acquired by CA Technologies in 2009 for for $200 million.
• Greg Dahl, EVP products and strategy: co-founder and VP marketing and business development at Storspeed and Tricord Systems, in clustered NAS appliances, before that, with same position for StorageTek’s networking division; also held executive management positions at Banderacom, MTX/Visara, and Unisys.
• Keith Carpenter, VP sales: VP sales at Storspeed and has held senior and sales positions at NetApp, EMC, and Auspex.

Number of Employees
30

Product Description
RapidCache is a NAS acceleration appliance of DRAM and SSD that delivers performance to I/O-intensive applications while relieving overburdened storage networks. It identifies the active dataset by analyzing the network flow between clients and file servers. Once identified, the active dataset is served directly from its DRAM and SSDs, improving the performance of files in greatest demand.

It consists of Data Server nodes and Flow Director switches. The RapidCache cluster derives its functionality from the IQ OS that is distributed software running across all Data Servers and Flow Directors.

Designed to sit in-network, RapidCache provides a view into storage through its analytics and reporting tool, RapidView. A single data server node features 144GB of DRAM and up to 3.2TB of SSD resulting more than 1,000,000 IO/s, according to the company.

                                       RapidCache’s place in data path

 
Released Date
First product on October 2011

Price Range
Configurations starting at $60,000

Technology Partners
Intel, VMware, Citrix    

OEM
None

Main Competitors
Accelerators such as Alacritech, Avere and Violin, and NAS vendors