Software Defined Archives -

Build your own private Amazon cloud at $1ct/GB with Cloudian

3 oktober 2014 by Willem ter Harmsel 1 Comment

Interview with founder and CEO Michael Tso
Date: 3 October 2014
Cloudian Profile

Interview with Michael Tso, CEO of Cloudian

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.

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Chetan Venkatesh: Founder and CTO of Atlantis Computing

20 augustus 2014 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

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.
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Atlantis Computing, the road toward USX. Interview with CEO Bernard Harguindeguy

3 juli 2014 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

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.
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John W. Thompson: CEO Virtual Instruments and Chairman of Microsoft

19 juni 2014 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

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…]

Interview with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta

18 november 2013 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

Maxta, interview continued with CEO Yoram Novick
Date: 18 November 2013
Maxta CrunchBase profile

CEO Series

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.

Maxta

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.

Read my interview with the CTO of Atlantis Computing, another player in the Software Defined Storage space

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
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Introduction to Maxta Storage

12 november 2013 by Willem ter Harmsel

Maxta, introduction by Yoram Novick
Date: 12 November 2013
Maxta CrunchBase profile

This article is followed up by an interview with the CEO of Maxta, Yoram Novick. Read the article here.

Maxta is a new player in the software defined storage space that caught my attention. Their solution creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The product is downloadable, 100% software only.

I received a whitepaper from them yesterday on which most of this article is based. Consider this a primer, later this week I will interview the CEO of Maxta, Yoram Novick.
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Interview Poojan Kumar – CEO of PernixData

4 november 2013 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

PernixData, interview with CEO Poojan Kumar
Date: 4 November 2013
PernixData CrunchBase profile

CEO Series

PernixData

Storage arrays have typically been designed for Data Services and not performance. By scaling up disks inside the array, performance does increase but the supporting infrastructure quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Server side flash offers a solution by being close to the application. However because it is a single device, you loose many of the crucial advantages of virtualization like mobility (HA & DRS)
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Jeda Networks – Software Defined Storage Networking

10 oktober 2013 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

Jeda Networks, interview with Stuart Berman
Date: 10 Oktober 2013
Jeda Networks CrunchBase profile

Jeda Networks: Software Defined Storage Networking

Following the first part of the interview with Stuart Berman, this article goes further into the inner workings of Jeda Networks. As a prelude to this article, I decided to first go into the significance of SDSN to the IT Infrastructure space. What does it represent and how is it significant?

The importance of Software Defined Storage Networking

Software Defined Storage Networking (SDSN) is a technology that allows customers a far easier and faster way to manage their data Storage in their datacenters. It allows large enterprise customers to very quickly scale up their storage environments and to very easily manage them.

SDSN is a type of Software Defined Networking (SDN), where the networking intelligence no longer resides in the physical network switches, but in a higher software layer. Configuration is done centrally, and new network hardware is quickly configured once added to the network. This allows IT administrators to manage far larger networks with many switches, and allows for great scalability and business agility.
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Interview with CEO of Jeda Networks | Stuart Berman

5 oktober 2013 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

Jeda Networks, interview with Stuart Berman
Date: 5 Oktober 2013
Jeda Networks CrunchBase profile

Jeda Networks created a Software Defined Storage Network solution that reduces complexity in the connectivity between the compute layer and storage layer. They abstract al the complexity into software and then use regular Ethernet fabrics to build these virtualized storage area networks.

They are in a specific niche in which very few (if any) have dared venture. The inspiration for contacting Jeda Networks goes back to an article by Duncan Epping that I read a while back.

CEO of Jeda Networks Stuart Berman and I had a call last week in which he provided insight into the start of the company and his vision on the Networking and Storage market. Jeda Networks is Stuart’s fourth startup that started 4 years ago. The company was self-funded for 2 years and received external capital 2 years ago.
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Greenbytes now 100% software focused; Interview with CEO Steve O’Donnell

21 augustus 2013 by Willem ter Harmsel Leave a Comment

GreenBytes, 1st interview with CEO Steve O’Donnell
Date: 21 August 2013
GreenBytes Crunchbase profile

Interview with GreenBytes CEO Steve O’Donnell

Today I had a skypecall with Steve O’Donnell, CEO of Greenbytes. In first part of a two-part interview, we discussed Greenbytes’ business strategy in light of this recent news.

Read the in-depth interview with Steve O’Donnell

As an introduction, let’s focus on what Greenbytes do and where their product adds value.

Greenbytes value proposition: VDI

The storage market is highly varied in technical solutions and there many startups with equivalent approaches. The large number of startups are hard to pin down in a framework to reveal how they relate to each other. I aim to zoom in on several storage startups that caught my attention and find out what sets them apart.

Greenbytes offers a solution specifically for VDI environments / relieves the Storage array by handling the VDI environment. Their current solutions are I/O Offload engine (Array+Software) and vIO (Software only).
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