CloudPhysics, Interview with CEO Jeff Hausman
Date: 25-2-2015
CloudPhysics Crunchbase profile
I had the pleasure to speak with Jeff Hausman of CloudPhysics, who took over the CEO role from founder John Blumenthal.
This interview is a follow-up of my interview with John a while back, when he was still the CEO.
I interviewed Jeff about his go-to market strategy, views on the global market space and CloudPhysics’ product evolution.
Interview with founder and CEO Michael Tso
Date: 3 October 2014
Cloudian Profile
This wednesday morning I had the pleasure to speak with Michael Tso at breakfast in an Amsterdam city-centre hotel.
Born in mainland China, Michael was raised in Shanghai and Hongkong, finished high school in Melbourne and graduated at MIT in 1993. In his 20 years business experience he not only lead companies commercially, but also accumulated 32 patents.
He’s the CEO of Cloudian, a company I only recently became aware of.
Interview with founder and CTO Chetan Venktatesh
Date: 20 August 2014
Atlantis Crunchbase Profile
In succession to the interview with CEO Bernard Harguindeguy I had the pleasure to speak with the CTO of Atlantis, Chetan Venkatesh.
As the founder of Atlantis, he provided great background to Atlantis. Enjoy the interview!
Willem ter Harmsel: Can you run me through the genesis of Atlantis Computing?
Chetan Venkatesh: 
I can! I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life and started Atlantis in 2006. I spent a lot of time in the datacenter, storage and Infrastructure space. I was keen to to explore the software that was on the server side to do something intelligent with storage.
We had Moore’s law deliver twice the horsepower at half the cost. I was inspired to create a storage model that took advantage of these increasing CPU cycles and RAM on the server side.
I wanted to bring data services like de-duplication and compression, that require a lot of CPU power, right next to the application.
(Smiling) It turns out that this is much harder idea to implement in practice than said. It took us almost 3 years to complete the first version of the product and we launched in 2009.
[Read more…]
Platform9, interview with CEO Sirish Raghuram
Date: 18 Augustus 2014
Platform9 CrunchBase profile
I recently spoke with Alex Benik of Battery Ventures, who argued the IT market has come to expect the ease-of-use and agility of public cloud services like AWS (Amazon Web Services).
Read my article with Alex Benik, partner at Battery Ventures here
Alex stated that internal IT organisations are increasingly benchmarked against AWS by their internal customers in terms of ease-of-use and speed. For traditional enterprises, that do not have the scale and resources of Amazon, it is very hard to meet the AWS service levels.
As circumstances would have it, soon after I picked up these insights I spoke with Platform9. They offer internal IT organisations a way to build a private cloud that approaches the agility and ease-of-use of AWS.
I had the great pleasure to speak with Sirish Raghuram, the CEO of Platform9.
[Read more…]
Interview with CEO Bernard Harguindeguy
Date: 3 July 2014
Atlantis Crunchbase Profile
I had the opportunity to speak with the original founder and CTO of Atlantis Computing, Chetan Venkatesh, and the CEO and chairman of the board Bernard Harguindeguy.
Both Bernard and Chetan have extensive experience in the datacenter space and were passionate about creating an optimal storage platform that solved many of the challenges their customers struggled with.
Read my interview with founder and CTO Chetan Venkatesh
Data storage solutions are typically sold as appliances; hardware with a smart software layer on top. The intelligence is in the box that you buy and is tailored to the hardware it lives with.
That approach makes sense until you take a wide-angle view on a real-world datacenter: independent storage boxes act well on their own, but are hard to aggregate into one centrally controlled storage pool. The result is that storage capacity is not used optimally and storage performance is hard to control.
There are several approaches to solving this problem, Atlantis Computing offer a software-only solution that places all intelligence in one hardware independent software layer. That means customers can run Atlantis USX on their existing server, network and storage hardware and control all types of storage centrally from one software layer.
Atlantis’ USX solution investigates the physical infrastructure it lands on and offers customers suggestions for various types of storage setups. Depending on the application requirements the customer can pick the recommended setup and tweak settings.
[Read more…]
Virtual Instruments, interview with CEO John W. Thompson
Date: 19 June 2014
Virtual Instruments CrunchBase profile
For my CEO Series I interview CEOs and founders of start-ups in IT Infrastructure, SAAS, Fintech, Mobile and eCommerce. Their views are shared on my blog.
Recently I had the great honor to speak with John W. Thompson. It is hard to introduce such a heavyweight, so I will start by listing a few of the most notable positions he occupies. His positions, besides being impressive – are relevant to understand the viewpoints he holds and voiced during the interview.
After a long career at IBM where he held various executive positions, John W. Thompson became CEO at Symantec, which he helped build to a $6 billion company over a period of 10 years. In 2009, he was contender to be secretary of the Department of Commerce.
In 2009 he became involved with Virtual Instruments (VI) as an investor and became CEO of VI in 2010. Besides this demanding role, in February of this year John W. Thompson was famously appointed Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, replacing Bill Gates. In this function he was involved in replacing former CEO Steve Ballmer with the current CEO Satya Nadella. Here is a link to his appointment speech.
Additionally, PernixData, Liquid Robotics, Domo and Seagate are among the companies where John holds advisory positions. [Read more…]
I was just playing around with Google Trends. A great tool to compare search popularity between search terms.
How much impact storage startups really have on the market is hard to pin down, but the search popularity of individual brand names does provide some perspective.
Below, I compared worldwide search popularity between Storage Startups over the last 6 years. I looked at three groups; Boxed Storage, Software-only Storage and Server-side Caching Solutions. Then to put the Startup scene in some perspective I compared the most popular of each group to storage giants EMC and Netapp.
Boxed Storage: Nutanix, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Tintri, Skyera
[Read more…]
Diablo Technologies, Riccardo Badalone on DDR4 plans
Date: 14 February 2014
Diablo Technologies Crunchbase Profile
I spoke with Riccardo Badalone yesterday, who updated me on the current state of affairs at Diablo.
Last time we spoke in September of last year, the interview was covered in a 2 part article, you can find part 1 here, and part 2 here. In that interview, Riccardo hinted towards a few great partnerships and customers coming up. In the period in between, the following has happened:
That’s quite some progress in barely 6 months time. There has also been some negative publicity concerning a lawsuit that Netlist filed against Diablo.
I caught up with Riccardo to discuss all of the above and hear about their plans for the upcoming year, particularly where new partnerships / customers and DDR4 are concerned.
The partnership with IBM is great news. Are you committed to an exclusive partnership with them?
IBM was the first to really recognise the value of what we were doing. They have very big plans for the technology and they made MCS a key piece of their X6 platform which is an awesome platform. They’re very important to us, we see them as a very valuable customer and integrator partner. That said, we have no exclusivity with them.
[Read more…]
Infinio, interview with CEO Arun Agarwal
Date: 23 November 2013
Infinio CrunchBase profile
Infinio
Centralized storage often represents the performance bottleneck of the datacentre stack. The storage array sits far away from the application and has to deal with changing I/O from multiple applications. As a result, latency to a busy storage array is high and performance can be unpredictable.
Moving storage closer to the application is a great way to solve the problem. Server side flash is close to the application and can act as a buffer to steady reads and writes to the centralized storage array.
A barrier to overcome with most solutions, is that customers are required to order hardware and invest in considerable work to perform the installation.
Recognizing these barriers, Infinio differentiates itself by offering a virtual appliance that uses existing server memory to cache reads. To sidestep any remaining organizational barriers, the product can be downloaded and fully tested for 30 days.
I Interviewed Arun Agarwal, CEO of Infinio to find out more about the company and the product.
[Read more…]
Maxta, interview continued with CEO Yoram Novick
Date: 18 November 2013
Maxta CrunchBase profile
As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.
In this article, I interview Yoram Novick, the CEO of Maxta Storage.
A short introduction to Maxta based on my introductory article of last week.
Maxta offers a software storage solution, that creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The solution works by installing their software on each of the servers you want to include and Maxta creates a storage pool across them.
Magnetic disks are leveraged for capacity and flash is used as a caching layer, with the capability of accelerating both reads and writes. For speed and redundancy, the software replicates writes between the server flash of different hosts, and de-stages to magnetic disks later.
I interviewed Yoram Novick to learn more about Maxta and his views on the storage market
[Read more…]