Company Profile: StorMagic

HQs
Bristol, England

Date founded
2006

Financial funding
Privately held

Revenues
$5.1 million according to Owler, Inc.

Main executives

Sally Duckworth, COB, is an experienced director in both C-level executive and non-executive roles for early stage and growth businesses. After qualifying as an ACA, she moved to JP Morgan as an investment banker and then became an early stage technology investor at Quester Capital Management. She has worked with the management team at StorMagic since the outset, helping to set up, fund and grow the business. She provides advice on a range of areas including sales and marketing, business development, human resources and finance. Furthermore, in 2018, she was named in the Female FTSE Board Report’s 100 Women to Watch.

Hans O’Sullivan, CEO and co-founder, with more than 30 years in technology leadership roles, has accumulated experience in the IP-based storage and protocols industry and has 7 patents to his name. Before co-founding StorMagic in 2006, he spent many years as CTO at leading IP storage company Eurologic, supplier of storage platforms to companies such as NetApp, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and Avid, and became CEO at Elipsan when it was spun off from Eurologic in 2003.

Chris Farey, CTO and co-founder, over the course of a 30 year career in software development, develops one of the world’s first iSCSI storage subsystems and one of the first commercial parallel OSs. After serving many years as CEO at K-Par Systems, he went on to become CTO at Eurologic‘s IPSAN division and CTO at Elipsan when it was spun off from Eurologic in 2003. He also held the post of distinguished engineer at Adaptec.

John Glendenning, SVP sales and business development, spent over 20 years in the enterprise software and hardware industry, having most recently led EMEA field operations for big data database company DataStax (Apache Cassandra). Prior to DataStax, he held a variety of roles in the UK and US including Virtual Computer, Citrix, XenSource and Platform Computing.

Bruce Kornfeld, CMO, is an experienced technology executive and has held various roles at NCR, Dell and Compellent. As VP marketing at Compellent, he helped the company grow revenue from $9 million to over $150 million, which led to their IPO and sale to Dell for $960 million. He was instrumental in building Dell’s first storage division in the late 1990s and helped grow it to over $1 billion.

Number of employees
Less than 100

Technology
StorMagic SvSAN

Product’s description

SvSAN is the virtual SAN that is simple, cost-effective and flexible. For edge computing environments, the technology is based on software-defined storage that eliminates the need for physical SANs. It is designed to be simple to install and manage whether deployed as part of a hyperconverged solution or as a storage-only target for any server environment.

Each instance of SvSAN runs as a VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) on two or more low-cost servers. SvSAN supports hypervisors, vSphere and Hyper-V, and provides the shared storage necessary to enable the hypervisor features such as HA/failover cluster, vMotion/live migration and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)/Dynamic Optimization.

SvSAN can be deployed with the flexibility to meet changing capacity and performance needs. This is achieved by adding additional compute or storage capacity to the existing servers without impacting service availability.

Release date
2010

Price
Pricing for SvSAN 6.2 Standard Edition starts at $2,480 and includes all of the management and HA features needed for a 2-node cluster with 2TB of virtualized storage, including one year of maintenance and support.

Pricing for SvSAN 6.2 Advanced Edition starts at $3,720 which includes all of the features of Standard Edition and adds support for military-grade data encryption and predictive storage caching.

Roadmap
To make advancements to simplify storage for edge computing environments with several new products and features planned for the future.

Partners
Cisco, Citrix, Lenovo, Microsoft, VMware, APC/Schneider Electric, Fornetix, Hytrust, Gemalto, Thales

Distributors and OEMs
Cisco, Lenovo, Bytec, Exertis, Prianto, Ready Informatica

Number of customers
1,000 around the world; many of those users have SvSAN installed in dozens, hundreds or even thousands of locations.

Main customers
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Cisco Secure Ops, E.ON Climate & Renewables, The Maho Group, Oxford University, St. Josefshaus, TDK Europe

Applications
The start-up offers low-cost hyperconverged solutions for edge environments. While more data is being collected and processed at the edge of the enterprise, most IT solutions are still designed for large data centers. StorMagic identified the need to provide highly-available systems so remote locations can have the uptime they require, but work within their limited budget. Since typical edge environments involve dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations, cost must be kept to a minimum. SvSAN 6.2 has the features and low-cost that is attractive to organizations looking to deploy in many sites without adding complexity. It is designed to operate in environments with poor network connectivity (9Kb/s, 3,000ms latency), and many customers have deployed the solution in remote locations like wind farms, oil rigs and on the back of military vehicles.

SvSAN is for edge and ROBO environments that demand low cost, HA and easy management, due to restricted budgets and limited IT staff.

Target market
Edge computing sites, ROBOs, retail stores, SME data centers and IoT

Competitors
Include Dell, HPE, Microsoft, Nutanix, VMware