Exclusive Interview With Marc Fleischmann, CEO and Founder, Datera

He is:

CEO and founder at Datera Inc.
Co-founder of the Open Source Business Alliance
Board member and co-founder Open Cloud Initiative
MD and co-founder at LongRun Technologies

He was:

CEO and founder at RisingTide Systems
CEO and founder at Smeet Communications GmbH
Board member at InnoTek
Group product manager at Microsoft
SVP engineering and GM DTV business unit at PixelWorks
Senior director software and director marketing at Transmeta
Member of technical staff at HP (now HPE)
CEO and founder of IMF

StorageNewsletter: Could you share with us the story of the company and the root of the project? What was (were) the driver(s) to start the project? What is the background of the founders?
Marc Fleischmann: My founding team at Datera are all technologists with expertise in the Linux Input/Output stack, distributed systems, automation and semiconductor design who all united around a vision to create a software-driven approach to scaling data infrastructure to challenge the prevailing standard embodied by legacy storage boxes. Now five years later, we have customers around the globe who have standardized on our platform and we are grateful to them for their trust and continued collaboration to take our platform to the next level.

You raised so far just $40 million round A, any plan to raise a second round?
Our investors are legends in enterprise software, including Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems fame, and Pradeep Singhu from Juniper as well as strategic technology providers like Samsung. In Datera, they see the opportunity to revolutionize the data layer, and we’ve taken their advice and worked with leaders and companies in their networks to build the best software-based solution on the market today. Right now, we are focused on scaling our platform and ability to serve our customers and, as we move forward, we will continue to weigh follow-on investments and investors that are consistent with our growth objectives.

How many people to you employ today? What about Datera worldwide coverage?
The Datera team numbers just under 100 employees and serves customers and partners throughout North America, Western Europe and Asia today. We expect to continue building the team in these key regions to keep up with the growth in customer interest we are experiencing. We amplify our direct team through our work with our software ecosystem, such as Docker and VMware, and our infrastructure ecosystem, including the leading server vendors like HPE and Cisco, to extend our reach and deliver customer success.

Datera was really visible with OpenStack, now more with Containers? What is your strategy? Enterprise, data center and/or cloud service providers?
Enterprises and services providers are in the midst of a massive, decade-long transition in application development and infrastructure design. They see the need for a software-driven, cloud-ready approach that can support a variety of applications and customers without the required care and feeding their legacy approaches required in the past. Our strategy is to enable them to make this change, and to do so with choice – choice in the computer environment, so they can use a combination of approaches like OpenStack or VMware or Containers; and choice in the infrastructure stack, to use their server vendors of record to build a software-driven infrastructure, often at 70% lower capital and operating costs.

Datera is really a block software-defined storage solution, what is your SDS definition?
Let’s face it, the promise of software-defined storage has quite simply not lived up to the hype. Why? Because providers have not delivered the performance that enterprises require, so these systems have been relegated to outposts within the portfolio, and the systems themselves are often thinly-veiled proprietary storage systems that push a specific hardware agenda. I’m not going to name names because I know your readers are very knowledgeable and know exactly who those companies are. At Datera, our mission is to deliver enterprise-class performance through a software-driven approach with the hardware agenda our customers want – the freedom to run our software on their servers of record.

You define your product as a data services platform? What do you mean?
We are grateful for the vote of confidence. Our customers brought the concept of data services to us, because while they see everything that we do to deliver the highest levels of performance, as measured by microsecond latency and millions of IO/s, they also see the rich set of services we enable for them, from data orchestration and application-driven quality of service to multi-tenancy and predictive data optimization.

As a SDS product, you should be fully hardware agnostic but several SDS on the market claim that and need finally this hardware card or component, meaning that finally you’re not fully independent. What about Datera?
Our customers are looking for a software-based solution without server lock-in. We’ve listened to them and expanded our partnerships with the leaders in server-based storage, including HPE, Dell, and Cisco, to deliver a complete solution to customers. We have worked with these partners on a standard set of configurations to maximize performance or capacity so that our customers can tailor a data environment that fits every specific need or data location. But no, we don’t have a hardware agenda, other than working with the leaders in flash media like Intel and Samsung to offer the greatest choice to our customers.

As mentioned, Datera was started to be a block storage entity, with 3.2 release a few weeks ago you announced S3 object storage based on Minio on the same platform, so you seem to go towards multi-protocol SDS, when do you plan to add NAS protocols?
At Datera, we’re obsessed with delivering the highest levels of performance for core enterprise applications and in the main, our customers are very comfortable with the block-based approach. But more and more, we see cloud-native applications incorporating the S3 object protocol from the start so we recently added that capability to our platform to facilitate these applications. For example, a customer of ours utilizes a farm of databases running on Datera to aggregate reservations via block, but also wants to present images and maps along with that data, which is facilitated through S3. Make no mistake though, these images and metadata are tuned for high performance to ensure that the application delivers the quality of experience required to dominate the market. We are not chasing the bulk, cheap and deep storage sector that many of the software-defined folks did when they realized their performance simply couldn’t cut it.

And of course, do you plan (and when) to add a scale-out NAS flavor to it?
NAS continues to be a market opportunity, and while there is nothing that would prevent us from adding NAS support to our system, our customers and partners continue to reiterate that as longs as Datera keeps delivering the performance and automation we have already delivered with block and object, they will standardize on our approach for their applications. We are focused mainly on deepening our capabilities and broadening our environments through our recently announced stretch clusters, enabling companies to go active-active across geographies and achieve a global scale of operation.

How do you see the cloud? Any plan running Datera on AWS, Azure, GCP…? If yes, what about geo or stretched clusters?
The rise of the hyperscalers and the public cloud has been fantastic for us because they have shown the entire market the power of a software-driven approach and that without automation from top to bottom, there simply is no scale of operation. Our customers want to bring the promise of the cloud experience on premise and marry that with the performance that the larger providers cannot achieve while dramatically reducing the insane prices they pay. While they also want to burst and scale their operation via the public cloud, we intend not to simply go the easy route and move backups off premise, but instead will enable active-active environments at scale.

How do you see your platform evolving over the next 12 months?
You can expect to see more and more coming from our joint work with our flash and server partners like Intel, HPE and Cisco, and with the container-ecosystem like Docker and Kubernetes.

In terms of team, you recently extended your executive layer, what’s the plan behind this?
Our plan is quite simply growth, growth, and growth – growth in our platform, growth in our technical and channel partnerships, and growth in our go-to-market. So to meet the tremendous customer demand we’ve experienced, ensure our customers become cloud-ready on the Datera platform, and expand our reach, we’ve been fortunate to add a fleet of industry veterans to scale our team such as Hal Woods from Western Digital as CTO and Narasimha Valiveti from Dell as head of product. I expect our team to continue to growth as the market continues to come in our direction.

What about your sales model and business strategy? What is the pricing model?
As you know, Datera is a software platform, so we provide our software for installation on server-based storage from our partners, and we do so on a subscription and term so that customers and partners can select what is right for them.

Do you plan any geo expansion in Europe or AsiaPac? Channel or your own presence?
We serve these markets today both directly and through our reseller partners, but we are looking to aggressively build out our presence in Europe and secondarily in AsiaPac. As we note in our recent release, we are focused on partnering with HPE, Dell and Cisco on the server-front and are looking to the channel partners that facilitate that.

Is OEM a strategy for you? I see HPE, Dell and Cisco as strategic partners, so should we expect something with them soon?
You are certainly a perceptive person, but no comment, except to say that we are very happy to be working with the partners you reference so that we can truly deliver on the promise of a software-defined data environment where others have dropped the ball or become pawns in a hardware game.

Read also:
Just Out of Stealth Mode, Start-Up Datera, Formerly RisingTide
In AWS-like elastic block storage for enterprises and service providers
by Jean Jacques Maleval | 2016.04.12 | News