Gridstore, the Mountain View based distributed storage vendor, today announced Series A funding lead by GGV Capital and Onset Ventures along with participation from their existing investors. Gridstore will use this to expand their sales efforts, possibly, in new market segments. Taking advantage of grid architecture and virtualization, Gridstore is hoping to disrupt the storage market dominated by monolithic vendors.
As we move more and more into the so called big data world, the need for storage increases exponentially irrespective of the size of the organizations. Data is going to be the critical factor from SMB to large enterprises. With this evolution, data storage is also evolving from a monolithic big iron solutions to distributed low cost solutions. Gridstore, currently focussing on the small and medium enterprises, offers a distributed solution with superior performance at lower economics. They removed the processing capabilities from storage so that the additional processing capacity can be best utilized by the organizations for their processing needs.
Some of the highlights that intrigued me from their offering are:
- Absolutely fantastic economics without compromising on the performance
- The performance improvement due to the way they have separated the processing from storage is very good. Compared to a $1M storage system from a legacy vendor, Gridstore solution of the same value offer 80X more performance
- The ease with one could add capacity is another important plus point for them. It is as easy as plugging their system in your network. Zero config installation allows organizations to scale as they grow without any complex capacity planning
Even though they are focussed on medium sized organizations, I am pretty sure they can disrupt the large enterprise market segment too. It will be interesting to see how they shape up in the coming years. I will also be curious to see how they meet the niche market need of keeping the processing capacity closer to data (especially in the case of large amounts of data distributed geographically but serving users globally).
