Any thoughts on this new firm...?
MonoSphere Whirls Out
Byte and Switch News Analysis
December 17, 2002
MonoSphere Inc. has emerged from stealth mode with software that melds storage resource management functionality with virtualization -- a unique proposition, the startup claims, that combines the best of both worlds.
It's hard to imagine why the market needs yet another next-generation SRM company, especially this late in the game, but MonoSphere insists it is different enough to carve out some space.
Current SRM and virtualization technologies do not fully address the under-utilization of storage capacity, MonoSphere reckons. Today's SRM software is good at identifying and making available unused storage capacity, but fails to go the whole nine yards and actually move the data to the available storage.
Meanwhile, virtualization is good at presenting an organization's physical storage resources as one logical "pool," so that applications can take advantage of underused capacity. But since administrators typically assign more storage than they need to an individual host, the excess capacity within these volumes cannot be made available to the pool once it has been assigned. The result? Large amounts of (expensive) storage sitting around unused.
MonoSphere refers to this underutilized capacity as "dark storage," an allusion to "dark fiber" lying around the telecom world (or perhaps to the "dark matter" that keeps the universe from flying apart). There's enough dark fiber knocking around to string the planets together, which is why MonoSphere draws this comparison. Along with the bevy of other storage management software companies, MonoSphere's essential goal is to help companies make better use of the storage hardware they have already purchased.
The difference between MonoSphere and, say, Arkivio Inc., OuterBay Technologies Inc., or ProvisionSoft Inc., is that it uses a block-level, rather than file-level, approach to managing the data. "We know nothing about the application," says Avi Shillo, founder and EVP of product operations at MonoSphere [ed. note: this is supposed to be a good thing]. "We look at the I/O pattern of the data, read/write data lengths, protection requirements, and depending on whether it is active or not, we make a decision about which storage it requires."
The company's Storage Manager software includes an out-of-band virtualization tool that runs across SAN, NAS, and DAN environments and Windows, Unix, and Linux servers; as well as "intelligent" volume management agents that reside on each storage-consuming application server. The software can then distribute volumes in accordance with I/O patterns across multivendor storage.
"Like the dashboard of a plane, there are hundreds of instruments with constantly changing inputs that are managed by sophisticated software," says Ray Villeneuve, president and CEO of MonoSphere, formerly a VP of marketing at Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP - message board). "A person does not need to be in the loop when data migration happens with MonoSphere." He notes that in the same way a human pilot can override the autopilot, a storage administrator using MonoSphere can manually provision storage if necessary.
The startup's technical team clearly has a proven track record. Dr. Amir Kolsky, chief architect, served in the same role at wireless software maker Comverse Ltd. and has worked extensively as a research fellow in IBM Corp.'s (NYSE: IBM - message board) research labs in the U.S.
Tamir Ram, MonoSphere's technical director, was last seen at Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS - message board) in the same role, and before that he was director of NT software engineering at Auspex Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ASPX - message board). Ram has two U.S. patents in the area of direct data transfer between networks and storage processors. Raviv Karnieli, VP of engineering, was previously CTO and founder of Postendo, a now-defunct email security software developer.
At least two top-tier VCs think MonoSphere is onto something good. [Ed. note: Either that, or they're following the herd.] The startup closed a Series B funding round of $7.1 million in August, bringing its total funding to about $9 million. The investment round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and includes previous investor Benchmark Capital. [Disclosure: Lightspeed Venture Partners in an investor in Light Reading Inc., publisher of Byte and Switch.]
MonoSphere, which has about 50 employees -- half in Tel Aviv, Israel, half in Redwood City, Calif. -- is building a small direct sales force and is talking to several systems integrators, though there's no word on any partnerships yet. It will also consider licensing its software on an OEM basis to "framework-class" software companies (read: BMC Software Inc. [NYSE: BMC], Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) [NYSE: CA], and IBM Tivoli). No word on this yet, either.
It claims to have several paying customers already, including a large telco, an international airline, and a consulting company, but was unfortunately unable to reference them directly.
MonoSphere appears to be off to a good start, but it's slap bang in the middle of a horde of companies charging after this market. We'll see if it keeps its feet long enough to make a difference.
Startups in the automated provisioning space include: AppIQ Corp., Arkivio, Astrum Software Corp., Invio Software Inc., OuterBay, Princeton Softech Inc., and ProvisionSoft. The big hitters -- including EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC - message board), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ - message board), and Veritas -- are also chasing this market. For a more complete list of companies in this space, see our report on Policy-Based Storage.
— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
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