This article is more than 1 year old

Which sneaky storage upstart is drilling into software-network craze?

PernixData: Do you think they'll notice us slipping in?

PernixData is a startup in stealth mode developing a data platform for the software-defined data centre (SDDC).

Stealth mode means the company has talked to angel or seed investors about its basic proposition and the money people like it well enough to pump in initial startup cash. A founding company organisation is then set up and the founders themselves - sometimes along with a few recruits - spend some time developing the proposition, a hardware design or software code. Then they draw up a business plan and give it to the venture capitalists (VCs) - hoping they're able to show them they have the basic underpinnings of a potential product that meets a market need better than anything else in a sustainable way. The VCs bless it if all goes well and an A-round of funding delivers more funding for continued development.

Back to PernixData. It was founded in San Jose around February last year by CEO Poojan Kumar and chief technology officer Satyam Vaghani, both ex-VMware. Kumar led the management of all VMware's data products, such as vFabric Data Director and vPostgres, according to his PernixData bio. Before that he was the engineering VP and co-founder of a video server appliance startup, PixBlitz. Before that his bio says he "co-founded and led the development of Oracle Exadata." Okay, that will excite potential backers.

Vaghani spent 10 years at VMware and created the VMware virtual machine file system (VMFS), and architected and implemented the vStorage APIs amongst other things. He has authored more than 50 storage-related patents and spent time in HP Labs before VMware.

Lightspeed Ventures seems to be involved in PernixData, with Bipul Siha, a partner at Lightspeed, being the founding investor and a board member.

PernixData

A flier for a talk given by Vaghani said "PernixData is creating a storage product that is disruptive yet very elegant in how it slides into an existing enterprise virtualisation infrastructure." It is computer software and hardware for use in cloud computing and virtualised and physical environments to enable multi-tenancy and resource management, according to a trademark registration.

Keep an eye out for PernixData on your storage futures radar. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like