Start-Up’s Profile: San Sentinel

Company:
San Sentinel SAS

Location:
HQs in Paris, and office in Suresnes, France

Date founded:
June 2010

Financial funding:
Self-funding; search to attract VCs to accelerate the development of its software on other platforms; executives are going in Israel to meet Moshe Yanai, to recruit him as advisory board member and looking at investors

Revenues and profitability:
Sales of €51,000 in 2011, €350,000 to €400,000 expected in 2012, and €1.2 million in 2013; expects to be profitable in 2012.

Main executives:

• CEO and founder Mike Uzan, 34, joined EMC France in 1999 in charge of engineering on the Symmetrix and then CLARiiON; last position was Solution Architects; left EMC in 2009.
• VP ops Jéronimo Munoz was COO at BeLocal Now! and formerly at Exanet, CA, Auspex, Amdahl, Oracle, Apilink, Sun France, and before that at the origin of the subsidiary of Apple in France.

Number of employees:
Ten including three developers

Technology:
The storage auditing, reporting and management software of less than 5MB correlates information using the administration layer of disk arrays – not the network – and does not need SNIA standard SMI-S. It replaces generally manually updated Excel files done by customers. No third-party software is needed to gather array configuration information. Data are correlated into a relational database (Sentinel Repository) and pushed to pre-defined dashboards and reports. Any client on the network can access centralized repository without software installation. It can also be used to calculate the price par gigabyte for each application for customers’ chargeback, eventually for cloud storage company to measure exactly the capacity’s consumption of each client. It’s possible to get a dashboard of 20 to 50 bays in less than one hour.

                              SAN Sentinel
        Storage Resource Management Architecture

Products:

• Sentinel Navigator: reporting solution based on native manufacturer API
• SanSentinel Collector: ‘Data Collection’ script that can be launched from any administration server (Unix or Windows) to gather basic non-correlated information
• Storage Health: browses existing SanSentinel repository to check all known best practices and configuration rules to generate a guidance report.
• PerfSentinel: dedicated application to monitor storage array performance statistics

Compatibility with:
EMC Symmetrix, CLARiiON, VNX and Celerra, and NetApp FASxxxx/Sxxx
    
Released date:
2012

Price range:
For flagship product Sentinel Navigator, end user prices are based on the number of bays involved (not the number of gigabytes) and depend on the level of the storage system: €4,000/year for high end (Symmetrix), €3,000/year for midrange (VNX), €2,000/year for low end.

Roadmap:
To extend the software to other storage platforms: EMC Isilon and Centera, HDS VSP and AMS, HP 3par, and IBM StorWize and SVC

Distributors:
Sales through the channel only, current distributors being SCC and Exclusive Networks in Europe, BRIDGE in Dubai

Number of customers:
About 20, essentially through SaaS model

Main customer:
Unknown French investment bank for 150 bays in 6 countries

Competitors:
Main independent competitor is Aptare (StorageConsole). Others are EMC (ProSphere), IBM (TSM), Storage Fusion, Northern Storage, NetApp (OnCommand Balance), CA and HP.