Exclusive Interview With Mihir Shah, CEO of StorCentric

We had the opportunity to interview Mihir Shah, CEO of StorCentric, Inc., supported by Surya Varanasi, CTO.

Shah is chairman and CEO of StorCentric since September 2018 based in Sunnyvale, CA. Before that, he was CEO and board member of Drobo from May 2015 to August 2018, CEO of BlueFin Technologies from August 2014 to May 2015 and VP, corporate development and strategy, at Brocade Communications from February 2010 to September 2014. He also spent some time at IBM, was board member at various companies (Zettaset, InMage Systems and Connectem) and collaborate with various investors entities between 1996 and 2009. He’s also board member at Enact Systems Inc. since August 2013.

StorageNewsletter.com: StorCentric is an umbrella company, could you update us on the company? Any private equity firms or VCs that support you?
Mihir Shah: StorCentric is the parent company of Drobo, Nexsan, Retrospect and Vexata The past year was a transformational year for StorCentric. We successfully integrated Nexsan into the StorCentric family of products and acquired both Vexata and Retrospect. Our team has grown revenues with a CAGR of 67% over the last 4 years, and we have raised both debt and equity from leading financial and institutions in North America.

We understand that StorCentric has a bit less than 200 employees and a turnover around $80 million for FY19. We also notice that Surya Varanasi, CTO, and Surya Turaga, COO, come from Vexata. What happened to Vexata? The product was and is still good but the market traction was pretty low?
Vexata’s all-flash NVMe solutions continue to deliver the best price performance metrics in the industry. Vexata products deliver 10X the performance and efficiency improvements at a fraction of the cost of existing all-flash storage solutions. Vexata did not have a strong route to market. StorCentric has a large number of very established channel partners particularly with Nexsan. Our partners now have access to transformative technology under the StorCentric umbrella to address the most mission critical use cases.

Mission of StorCentric?
StorCentric aims to provide world-class customer experience with a broad and complete portfolio of data management storage solutions.

So, I understand StorCentric owns Nexsan, Drobo, Vexata and Retrospect. Could you share some market adoption figures about them?
Combined, StorCentric has shipped over 1 million storage solutions and has won over 100 awards for technology innovation and service excellence. Our customers include some of the largest M&E, research, financial, healthcare and government institutions in the world.

What are the recent features added for these 4 products?
Surya Varanasi: The past couple of months have been very busy with product developments and new announcements. We recently added QLC-based storage to the Nexsan E-Series product line for demanding enterprise environments at unbeatable economics. For the Nexsan Assureon product, we added RoCE for performance improvements for data retrieval, and added Blockchain technology for enhanced security. We will have new announcements coming out this quarter and early next quarter on both Retrospect and Drobo products focused on performance improvements, simplified deployments, and interoperability between the brands.

We imagine that some features will be shared with other products, could you illustrate this?
We will bring QLC SSD technology to the data vault use cases. It allows customers to consolidate from two disparate data storage systems (primary storage systems & archive storage systems) to an active data vault. We are also considering making our Assureon data vault available in the cloud so customers can further protect their data and leverage our data vault technology.

What is the future of Drobo? Could we expect some Drobo appliance coupled with Retrospect?
We will continue to focus on the consumer and the SMB customer with Drobo. Retrospect + Drobo is definitely in the cards. StorCentric is also innovating on new workflows for professional camera/videographers that significantly simplify workflows.

What about coupling Retrospect with Assureon?
Retrospect backup into a Unity + Assureon active data vault is definitely a product. We are introducing this product to our customers.

In term of product evolution, you have a SMB NAS with Drobo, do you plan to have such data services on top of Nexsan and/or Vexata to play in enterprise NAS?
Unity, part of our Nexsan brand of products, is a multi-protocol storage system. A single system can support NFS, SMB, iSCSI and FC (so both block and file). We continue to optimize and innovate here so watch for announcements.

What is the plan for Nexsan and NVMe? And of course NVMe over Fabrics? Other directions?
Yes, this is part of our roadmap and we will introduce an NVMe SSD based storage product. StorCentric will support all protocols that are relevant to our customers.

Recently you upgraded Assureon with 40GbE RoCE interconnect which is a surprise for a long-term retention solution. Why you didn’t add first a S3 interface to offer flexible and remote access? Any other developments?
An S3 interface, much like an NFS interface, is a protocol to access our data. Assureon is not deployed as an object store or an NFS storage server – instead it is deployed as an active data vault. It works in concert with our Assureon edge server OR the Unity storage system to provide a comprehensive solution for the active data vault function.

The Unity storage solution provides the NFS/SMB interface which is used to access data. The Assureon technology uses the NFS store to provide this function.

If customers already have an NFS device, we deploy an edge device (Assureon edge server) to provide an interface to move data to the Assureon data vault. 

The RoCE interface speed increase was designed to solve high speed access to data when the Assureon edge + Assureon data vault are used as primary storage. This unique case is a consolidation of the primary and backup/data vault environments to a single environment where an increase in speed is necessary to solve the requirements of primary storage.

What can we expect in 2020 for Vexata?
Expect to see a continuous increase in market share as we compete and win against the largest competitors in the market with a revolutionary product. We will introduce QLC-based solutions with Vexata for customers who want to take advantage of QLC economics and are running a large number of analytics. Vexata and the Nexsan E-Series both have a unique architecture that can optimize the endurance of QLC flash.

What about a portfolio effect to increase your market footprint? I mean cross- and up-sell push
Mihir Shah: Cross-selling and up-selling is certainly part of our overall strategy. We have a land and expand strategy where we are able to introduce different products under the StorCentric umbrella for different use cases. For example, Vexata is introduced for critical workloads in a Nexsan installment. Our customers appreciate that we are able to provide multiple solutions for their storage workflows.

What about your go-to-market strategy? Are you 100% channel?
We are primarily sold through channel, but we do have some strategic accounts that like to deal with us directly.

What is your cloud strategy?
Surya Varanasi: Our customers already use products to leverage cloud storage. Our Retrospect Backup software backs up data from on-prem applications to either an external cloud (over 20 supported across the world) or an internal cloud. We will continue to enhance our integration between Retrospect and the other products to provide seamless cloud connectivity for our customers.

Do you plan new acquisitions in 2020? And if yes, in which domain? And what are your goals for 2020?
StorCentric innovation is centered around customers and their specific data requirements. We will continue to build a portfolio of products internally or through acquisitions that solves our customers problems. We are evaluating new acquisitions to round out our solution set in the data management domain.

Read also:
StorCentric Acquires Retrospect
Third acquisition after Drobo and Nexsan to offer storage, archiving and backup solutions
July 3, 2019 | Press Release
StorCentric Continues Shopping, Acquiring Struggling Start-Up Vexata in AFAs
After Drobo, Nexsan and Retrospect
June 27, 2019 | Press Release
StorCentric: Holding Storage Company Owner of Drobo and Nexsan
Total revenue goal to approach $80 million in FY19
March 13, 2019 | News