Start-Up Profile: Rozo Systems in Software-Defined Scale-Out NAS
French company now also in California
By Jean Jacques Maleval | October 8, 2015 at 2:31 pmCompany
Rozo Systems SAS (formerly Fizians SAS)
HQs
Nantes, France, and more recently San Mateo, CA (Rozo Systems, Inc.)
Founded in
July 27, 2010
Financial funding
€700,000 in December 2014, seed round led by Nestadio Capital and Ouest Angels
Revenue and profitability
Revenue at €26,800 with net loss of €132,200 in 2014
Founders and main executives
- Co-founder and CEO, Pierre Evenou, formerly research engineer at Institut de Recherche et de Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes (IRCCyN) from 2005 to 2010
- Co-founder Jeanpierre Guedon, professor at Nantes University and inventor of ‘Mojette’ (used in the product)
- Co-founder and marcom director Louis Le Gouriellec, network specialist who was marketing director for Alcatel
- CTO Didier Feron, previously at Alcatel-Lucent
- COO Michel Courtoy, board’s director and consultant at Breker Verification Systems, board member of angel investor X5 Systems, formerly president and CEO of Certess, acquired by SpringSoft and beginning his career as design engineer at Intel
- Chief support officer Jean-Pierre Monchanin, former Alcatel employee
- Director business development Christophe de La Guerrande, previously at Iguane Solutions, Bestraw : Bamboo straw for drink., Bouygues Telecom, Videosave, IdzalX, CIEME Informatique, Canon France and Bonizoo
Most recently were elected at the board of advisors of the start-up two people who formerly worked for competitors Scality and Cleversafe:
- Philippe Nicolas left Scality last August for an unknown reason after four-year as product and industry strategist, after working at Brocade, Symantec, Veritas, SGI and Compaq.
- Eric Friis is an enterprise sales leader who was a contributor in the start-up phases of Maginatics, Cleversafe, Maxiscale and NextiraOne.
Number of employees
Less than 10
Technology
RozoFS is a software-defined scale-out NAS solution based on proprietary Erasure Coding technology named Mojette Transform to deliver real-time performance, high resiliency and low cost for petabytes multi-user storage systems.
The Mojette Transform algorithm, running on x86 servers powered by Linux, is able to generate multiple chunks and to store them on several servers, generating only one and an half copy to save storage capacity compared to more hungry simple replication. The result is that files can be used even if some servers break down.
The company said: “Data is only stored 1.5 times in the system to obtain a 99.9999% availability level and, thanks to its self healing, a 99.99999999999% durability level. Using this technology, RozoFS can withstand at least up to four simultaneous (configurable) failures in the commodity storage pool.” It claims that “tested in sequential and random I/O workloads on a 4-node platform, RozoFS provided up to 110,800 IO/s and 5.9GB/s.”
The more nodes you add the more throughput you get.
Released date
January 2015, last version 1.5.5 on July 2015
Price range
Not revealed but software is licensed per node regardless of capacity
Roadmap
RozoFS V1.6 in alpha
Technology partners
HP, Dell, Mellanox (for 40GbE switches), SuperMicro
Integrators
Concat in Germany and Austria, Alyseo and Duonyx in France
Number of customers
10
Known customers
CNED, CUN (Communauté Uurbaine de Nantes), French Ministry of Higher Education and Research for the CARMIN project, Puy du Fou, IRCCyN, Université de Nantes (projet Fec4Cloud)
Applications
Requiring fast IO and transparent and resiliency: file service and storage, converged infrastructure for specific use cases aligned with media and entertainment, life sciences, oil and gas, and HPC
Competitors
Amplidata/HGST, Cleversafe/IBM, Red Hat, Scality, Qumulo and other Lustre or GPFS based product as well as Isilon/EMC with hardware and software
Read also:
Concat exklusiver Partner of RozoFS für Deutschland und Österreich German
Hardwareunabhängiges Scale-out NAS von französische Hersteller Rozo Systems
2015.07.21 | Press Release
Jeune pousse française, Fizians lève 700.000€ French
Pour son déploiement commercial en Europe et en Amérique du Nord où une filiale vient de voir le jour
2015.02.11 | Press Release
French Start-Up Fizians in Software Scale-Out NAS File System
Based on product called RozoFS
by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2015.01.02 | News
Comments
To succeed, the French start-up with an innovative technology will have to raise one or two more financial rounds between at least €10 million to €20 million. That's why the company is also now in USA where CEO Evenou is now located and where VCs are much more generous than in France.
It has a good chance to get more money as software-defined scale-out NAS, giving the possibility to store petabytes on commodity hardware, will become a major market even if the number of competitors is increasing.
Two start-ups in this field were recently acquired by storage giants, Amplidata by WD/HGTS and Cleversafe by IBM.
Up to now, Rozo Systems has not announced the support of SSDs and it will be great, like Qumolo, to add real-time analytics to the software.
CEO Evenou is unknown in the storage industry and it will be useful for the French firm to recruit a well known US storage veteran to promote the company in USA and attract VCs.
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