looking to sources such as e-mail or video surveillance to gather intelligence on things like company security and compliance. The Terascala system can help the company quickly process that information on hundreds of thousands of employees, Butler says. “It’s all about a company being more efficient to get more information to better run your business on,” he says.
Much of Terascala’s founding team comes from Network Engines (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NENG]]), a maker of technologies to better help software developers run their applications. They wanted to bring the same plug-and-play nature of the Network Engines technology to data storage, and built the Terascala appliances on an existing open-source parallel file system called Lustre, Butler says.
Last month, the company announced a partnership with Dell, in which the Texas-based computer maker will be shipping storage systems for high-performance computing, built with Terascala’s technology. The machines are targeted toward higher education customers and other research environments.
Butler sees future business opportunities for Terascala in the large number of organizations that are shifting to virtualization computing models. (Yesterday, Greg profiled a company working on the virtualization of data management: Waltham, MA-based Actifio.) Because more data centers are running on a virtualization infrastructure, functions like data storage are sharing space with other applications, he says. Even companies processing smaller amounts of data than Terascala’s typical customer may need the additional external data storage if they’re virtualizing their processes.
“They’re going to get kicked into this and will need more high-performance storage,” says Butler. This new arena of usage, combined with Terascala’s future shift to selling its software separately, could help the company get the sales boost it is looking for to grow.
