Whoosh, whiff, swiffle.. CLINK: Cleversafe chucks $50m in vault

Investors not shy about investing in object storage, are they?

Upcoming partnerships in the US and Japan

El Reg: So you were brought in to increase Cleversafe's business growth rate. Could you comment on this please? (We note that, earlier this year, Dell discontinued an OEM relationship with Caringo, indicative of Dell experiencing sales problems in object storage.)

John Morris: Steady growth is our main objective for the foreseeable future. We have something invaluable and unique and I’m sure that’s attractive to a lot of companies, but our objective is to focus on the task at hand and that’s developing and delivering the most innovative solutions to solve multi-petabyte storage needs and take the cost of storage out of the budget equation.

El Reg: Judging by this statement, substantial product development work is needed: "The company intends to continue its legacy of innovation and technology leadership by focusing on delivering higher performance solutions with multiple classes of storage to address more demanding customer workloads, more scalable solutions that ensure customers don't have to worry about outgrowing their storage system, and more interface options to make it easier for customers to take advantage of the benefits of dispersed object storage."

John Morris: We’re expanding our classes of storage to address more use cases and partnering with leading industry vendors to solve storage challenges such as power efficiency. We are also expanding the interfaces that we support to accommodate our customers’ use of a wide variety of industry interface connections with the ability to access individual objects over multiple protocols.

El Reg: Could Cleversafe indicate who the industry partners might be and what they might contribute?

John Morris: Earlier this year, Cleversafe launched its Solutions Network an ecosystem of technology partners, including:

• The two leading backup and archive software products: Symantec and CommVault,
• Many of the leading cloud gateway providers: Panzura, Qstar, TwinStrata,
• Several of the cloud sync and share technologies: Mezeo, Ctera, Gladinet, SolidInstance,
• The leading network optimization providers: Cisco, F5, Riverbed,
• Leading Operating Systems providers: Microsoft, RedHat, VMware,
• Leading infrastructure providers: Intel, Seagate, Supermicro.

I mentioned Lockheed Martin and In-Q-Tel above, with whom we’re working on massive-scale opportunities with the US federal government. In addition, we are partnering with two of the top 10 IT services companies in the US as well as CTC Itochu Techno Solutions, a multi-billion dollar leader in systems integration in Japan, among many others.

El Reg: Is Cleversafe thinking of off-setting its storage hardware costs by working with partners?

John Morris: Cleversafe is always evaluating hardware technology partners to deliver its unique capabilities on the right hardware platform. We are working closely with a couple of large hardware vendors to qualify their big data storage platforms with our software and give customers additional options. We are not ready to announce which platforms yet, but will be making product announcements later this fall that will give an indication of this direction.

El Reg: How would Cleversafe position its storage technology with regard to Amplidata, Caringo, DataDirect Networks, EMC Atmos, EMC ViPR, NetApp StorageGrid, HP's object storage and Scality?

John Morris: We are the clear leaders in object storage, having shipped 200PB to solve some of the world’s biggest data storage challenges with proven technology that’s based on 88 issued and allowed US patents.

The legacy vendors push yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems while we’re solving today’s with proven innovation and pushing the envelope for tomorrow. The small players don’t have proven solutions, so they are far behind, and we are extending our lead.

The Reg verdict?

Here's a CEO full of energy and backers, convinced that Cleversafe's strategy and product pitch is good enough to warrant investing $55m. Good luck, people. ®