San Jose, CA-based startup Velostrata emerged from stealth mode today with $14 million in hand and a new option for businesses that are wary of storing their data in the Web-based servers of the “public cloud.’’
Velostrata’s software makes it possible for companies to tap into the computing power available from that shared Web-based infrastructure, without also being required to store their data in the public cloud. Customers can quickly switch some of their processing workload to an outside company such as Amazon Web Services, but continue to store their data in their own in-house IT centers, according to Velostrata. Dozens of businesses have been using the software in beta testing.
The tactic of “decoupling compute from storage” allows companies to use Web-based computing as needed, and avoid the expense of overbuilding their own infrastructure to handle periods of peak demand, says Velostrata founder and CEO Issy Ben-Shaul (pictured above.) The startup, which Ben-Shaul founded in 2014 with Velostrata chief product officer Ady Degany, claims its technology is the first of its kind.
“The most consistent feedback we have heard from customers, analysts and press, is that they have not heard (of) any company that does this, so there are no competitor(s) that offer decoupling compute from storage,” Ben-Shaul said in an e-mail exchange with Xconomy.
Ben-Shaul was previously a co-founder of Actona, a wide area networks optimization company that was acquired by Cisco in 2004, and Wanova, a desktop virtualization company bought by VMware in 2012.
Velostrata announced today that it has closed a $14 million Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners and 83North, formerly named Greylock IL Partners.
Norwest Venture Partners general partner Dror Nahumi, in a statement about the funding announcement, said Velostrata’s technology addresses a bottleneck in the adoption by businesses of the “hybrid cloud”—the combined use of public and private computing and storage infrastructure as needed.
“Every CIO is being asked by the management team and board to migrate enterprise infrastructure to the cloud, yet a mere fraction of IT spending goes toward cloud services,” Nahumi said. “Adoption is low because current cloud migration technologies are plagued by challenges like security and compliance risks, cost, migration time, complexity and vendor lock-in. Velostrata provides an innovative hybrid cloud approach that eliminates all these challenges and empowers CIOs to accelerate the migration quest using an evolutionary, secure, and highly cost effective platform.”
