Start-Up Assurance Storage Delivers Failure-Free Storage and Caching

Assurance Storage LLC launched as a storage solutions company focused on delivering software for customers looking to manage their increasing storage pools.

Former Cisco executive Steve Visconti and former Greenplum co-founder and CEO, Dave Powell have joined forces to deliver storage software, designed to solve difficult data center storage management issues.

Assurance is delivering software solutions
focused on three industry pain points:

the high rate of HDD failures with Assurance Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR),
the imprecision and lack of cache scaling with Assurance SmartTier and
ILM with Assurance Tier Management Engine (TME).

Assurance’s software suite leverages off-the-shelf industry-standard hardware enclosures to provide both scale-up and scale-out to support the needs of today’s environments of cloud computing, virtualization, and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) as well as high-performance applications such as database processing, data mining, analytics, video production and more.

The software portfolio includes Assurance Virtualization Software, Unified Driver Architecture with integrated Data Transformation Services such as de-duplication, Encryption, and Assured SmartTier autonomic Tier Management Engine. The Assurance software suite is designed to provide the efficient use of HDD and SSD.

Assurance’s patented software can be delivered as stand-alone products for integration in OEM applications or combined with Assurance HDD and SSD enclosures to create performance storage solutions. Assurance is working with Sanmina-SCI as partner for hardware platforms, consulting and supply chain management. The relationship allows Assurance to leverage hardware while focusing on storage software for next generation data centers.

By focusing on providing solutions as software, Assurance customers can take advantage of the latest chip enhancements such as Jasper Forest and Sandy Bridge, both from Intel.

Steve Visconti and Dave Powell, along with key members of the technical team, have teamed up to launch Assurance with much of the IP developed by Atrato, along with some key enhancements.

Steve Visconti brings over 25 years of domestic and international business development, sales, marketing and management success. Steve’s leadership experience includes technology companies and start-up ventures including Cisco Systems, Inc., Airespace, Ascend, Chipcom and Banyan Systems.

Dave Powell is an experienced international software executive who has built enterprise software businesses, many with revenue exceeding $100 million, throughout his career. He was a co-founder and CEO of Greenplum, which delivers large scale data warehousing solutions using open-source software on commodity hardware. Greenplum was recently acquired by EMC.

Assurance is headquartered in Louisville, CO and is backed by some of the industries greatest luminaries.

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We got the following article at Storagetopics on the web from an anonymous employee of Atrato from October 2009 to October 2010:

In November of last year Atrato closed its doors after a two year struggle to reinvent itself from an entrenched hardware company into an innovative software developer. Founded in 2004, Atrato introduced a unique hardware platform that exploited the 2½" disk form factor and with an innovative packaging design they shoe-horned 160 drives into a highly efficient, high IOP, 3U rack form factor. Designed with the VOD market in mind the product was launched but due to performance issues (latency) and questionable product completeness it failed to gain significant traction. In 2009 the company embarked on an effort to reinvent itself with the development of some very innovative storage management software including intelligent tiered storage with integrated intelligent cache management.

Unfortunately, despite some early success with this new focus, investor patience was exhausted before the company could establish meaningful market traction.

In November of last year a group of investors acquired the assets of Atrato, including the IP, formed a company and launched in January as Assurance Software and Hardware solution LLC (aka Assurance Storage). The new company includes eight of the original employees including a core team of five engineers. The leader of the new company is Steve Visconti, formally the Atrato CEO. Talking with the members of the company they appear to have a clear focus on continuing to develop storage management software without the encumbrance of supporting hardware. Not to say that hardware will not be a part of their solution, it will, but will just not be their native hardware. They are apparently in discussions with a major hardware ODM/vendor to supply them with their physical device requirements.

In response to the question what's different with the new company Visconti responded: "Our charter is much different than Atrato. Assurance Storage is focused on delivering innovative storage software for 'Off-The-Shelf' storage enclosures and OEM. We see very lucrative opportunities in developing software which lessens the burden of data center manager's risk and workload through software intelligence and autonomics. One example is our Assurance Virtualization Software which has integrated Fault detection, Isolation and Recovery intelligence which significantly reduces the potential for service interruptions and data loss. We do plan to offer support to Atrato customers by offering them ongoing support agreements for the SAID plus we will have migration options to our new 3 ½ HDD enterprise enclosures."

As many of my readers probably know I spent a lot of time with Atrato in 2010. I was, and still am, a fan of the management software that the Atrato engineering team was working on. They were ahead of the competitive curve with a unique autonomic architecture that addressed one of the fundamental issues associated with tiered storage management, that of management complexity.

Assurance has inherited a technology foundation that is impressive, not just in the tiered storage management but as was described to me in the development of broader storage and data transformational services.

Bottom Line: Technology is not the impediment to success but the ability of the company to execute on the foundation they have inherited. The team at Assurance are bullish but only time will tell if they will be successful.