Start-Up DataGravity Launched by Two EqualLogic Veterans

DataGravity, Inc. is an emerging start-up being led by a pair of EqualLogic veterans:

CEO and co-founder Paula Long previously co-founded EqualLogic, acquired by Dell for $1.4 billion in 2008, where she was EVP products and strategy. She remained at Dell as VP storage until January 2010. Then she served as VP software development at Heartland Robotics. Paula is on the board of SugarSync and an advisory board member for several storage related start-ups including StorSimple.
President and co-founder John Joseph was VP storage solutions marketing at Dell for three years after the acquisition of EqualLogic. In 2003, he joined this later company as VP marketing and product management to launch the company and the PS Series products into the iSCSI SAN market. Prior to EqualLogic, he was VP marketing for the enterprise class hard disk drive products at Maxtor and Quantum. At DEC in the late 1980’s, he lead engineers to develop silicon packaging technology, new computer cooling methods, and large system hardware design.

At least two other former EqualLogic’s and Dell’s ‘s employees are working at DataGravity, Chuck Guldenschuh as infrastructure engineer and Bryan Palmer as director of storage.

Located in the same city as EqualLogic, Nashua, NH, DataGravity has just raised $12 million in series A this month from two Boston VCs, Charles River Ventures – who was also an investor in EqualLogic – and General Catalyst Partners.

"Turning Data into Information" is the official DataGravity’s mission. On its web site, the company writes: "Virtual tiered storage is designed to allow some of these silos to cohabitate and simplify management. Storage, even for big data, is focused on storing the data, not harvesting the information about the data without complex and expensive host-based software used to gain insight on what this data is revealing. DataGravity’s products will remove the need for these complex software packages, and will help our customers extract value and information, from their stored data."

"We are thinking about the contextual relationship between information, and the solution a person might be looking for," Joseph says to boston.com.

Data gravity is a term coined in a blog post by Dave McCrory for analyzing clouds.

The start-up, currently recruiting, will be more specifics about its today’s vague activity, apparently in software rather than hardware, in the next coming months.