by Matt Gallagher, Red Herring
Barely a month after its launch, SimpliVity has raised a $25 million investment led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to help propel its “data center in a box” technology to market. Existing investors Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures also contributed.
Living up to its name, SimpliVity strives to simplify the data center, an increasingly complex environment weighed down by a proliferation of special purpose appliances built by a range of often competing vendors. The company’s flagship product, the OmniCube™, is an all in one device that consolidates these multiple components within a single infrastructure that is optimized for virtualized environments and the Cloud. It essentially melds eight to 10 workloads into a single appliance. At inception, all data is deduplicated and compressed at fine granularity (4k-8k), and managed at that size throughout its life cycle. Two OmniCube’s form an OmniCube Global Federation to allow consistent backup of data, and cubes can be further added as needed to scale its functionality. Each OmniCube enables 40 terabytes of data with 12 cores of Intel processors and up to 800 gigabytes of memory. An entire complex system can be managed by a single person globally.
The company’s technology is in an early stage of a new market for converged infrastructure solutions, commonly described as convergence, data center in a box, or a software defined data center. Both the scope of functionality as well as the degree of efficiency drive the total cost of ownership in the market, reducing the number of products purchased as well as managed while reducing space, power and maintenance costs. While SimpliVity directly competes with the current converged solutions that are offered by the large vendors (IBM, Dell, HP, VCE), the company’s CEO Doron Kempel told Red Herring such comparisons are ultimately unfair towards those vendors. The larger players don’t offer deduplication, WAN optimization, Cloud integration, or other sophisticated attributes, and can be very expensive.
SimpliVity, on the other hand, features 2-3 x reduction in acquisition cost as well as 2-3 x reduction in operating costs.
“Our belief is that current market narrative speaks to a desire to have infrastructure that is not expensive, runs on commodity hardware and that is assimilated the way Google and Amazon have built their infrastructure,” Kempel said.
Google and Amazon, offer an SAAS product. SimpliVity offers a cost effective yet powerful solution that can either stand alone on a private cloud, or be housed through a Google or Amazon service.
“SimpliVity offers a new topology that is fully integrated and low cost but with rich functionality,” Kempel said.
SimpliVity, therefore, faces a multibillion IT category “that we think we are best positioned to lead,” Kempel said. Though the company faces competition from Nutanix, FlexPod and NetApp, Kempel estimates the company’s technology is about two to three years ahead of the market.
Founded in 2009, the company’s time has finally come. Kempel expects SimpliVity to reach a hyper growth stage in 2013, which this latest $25 million round will help achieve. Though the company faced offers from a number of venture firms, KPCB proved to be “the best match,” Kempel said.
“With KPCB, you get the gravitas that is required for a revolutionary technology,” Kempel said. “They provide notoriety, and the type of industry experience and contacts they bring is quite unique.”
The company is currently in private beta with about six large customers. It plans to launch its product to market by December.