Start-Up’s Profile: TwinStrata

Company:
TwinStrata, Inc.

HQs:
Natick, MA

Date founded:
2007

Financial funding:
$13 million including $8 million in 2011 series B from Avalon Ventures and other angel investors.

Revenue and profitability:
The company doesn’t do not disclose revenue but said that total 2013 bookings grew 250% from 2012. It’s one of the fastest growing storage start-up in the world.

Main executives:

•  Nicos Vekiarides, CEO and co-founder, served formerly as VP of product strategy and technology at Incipient (IPs acquired by Texas Memory acquired by IBM) where he helped deliver a storage virtualization solution embedded in a Cisco switch fabric.
• John Bates, CTO and co-founder, also came from Incipient in the development group to broaden technology portfolio and as a technology manager for OEM partners.
• Nicholas Kourtis, COO, was COO at RightPath Payments, an early-stage company developing and offering ASP hosted, bank-branded business-to-business financing and payment solutions.
• Jason Coville, VP sales, joined from HP Vertica, and, prior to that, was director of sales operations of the Americas for Acronis.
• Thomas Dionne, VP, alliances and business development, served for EMC, Dell, EqualLogic (acquired by Dell) and Pirus Networks (acquired by Sun).

Number of employees:
35

Technology:
CloudArray, cloud-integrated storage software for mid-sized companies

Products description:
CloudArray enables organizations to scale their SANs and NAS with on-demand cloud storage, providing a solution to data growth, offsite backup and DR, giving access to an unlimited pool of cloud-based storage without sacrificing existing investments.

The software integrates a number of security and availability features and is compatible with more than 20 cloud storage offerings. CloudArray is available as a virtual or physical appliance in several configurations up to 50PB. It presents cloud storage using iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, and provides flexibility and compatibility with existing applications. A local cache accelerates data access to match performance of on-premise storage systems. CloudArray includes DR as a Service, which delivers virtualized environments with an on-demand way to backup and recover both data and applications at a moment’s notice – without racking up ongoing secondary infrastructure costs.

The latest version, CloudArray 4.8, also includes broader file access capabilities, file sharing across sites, secure bulk ingestion and cloud-to-cloud migration.

Released date:
CloudArray 4.8 became available on February 7, 2014.

Price:
Software-only ‘Bring Your Own Cloud’ CloudArray subscription starts at $99/month for 1TB. CloudArray cloud storage bundle includes cloud storage costs and transfer fees starts at $0.19/GB/month.

Roadmap:
Innovative data reduction and enhanced enterprise storage capabilities

Technology partners:
AppAssure, Cirix, DataCore, IBM (PureFlex), Unitrends, Veeam, VMware, and Waterford Technologies.

Cloud storage provider partners:
20+ including Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Atmos/EMC, Cleversafe, Cloudian, EVault, Google, HP Cloud, Mezeo, OpenStack, Rackspace, Scality, and SoftLayer.

Channel:
Resellers, distributors and systems integrators including Cloud Solutions Group, Commtech, Conduit Systems, MMY Consulting, Nephos Technologies, Ready Informatica, and TriCore.

Number of customers:
250, mainly within education, healthcare, media/advertising and manufacturing verticals, for 600 installations of CloudArray representing 6PB of capacity under management – doubling this amount from 2012 to 2013.

Customers:
Include Alpha Media Group, American Academy of Dermatology, American Federation of Government Employees, Aziende Italia (woith Scality), Bit9, BNMC, Boston Symphony Orchestra, ChemPoint, Complex Media, Flexi-Van Leasing, IAC, Indiana Wesleyan University, Los Angeles Unified School District, Mosaik, National Lloyds & American Summit Insurance, ONeil and Associates, Russell Lands, RxStrategies, Salient Federal Solutions, St. John’s Prep, and Westway.

Applications:
For expansion or replacement of existing SANs or NAS used for primary data, backup, archive data and on-demand DR.

Target market:
Mid-market organizations and divisions/departments of enterprises

Competitors:
Primarily status quo – traditional storage and DR strategies such as more storage arrays, tape drives, hosting and colocation. Also Ctera, Nasuni, Panzura, Riverbed and StorSimple.