Last September, I decided to leave Rubrik, one of the fastest growing software companies, to join Excelero, an early stage storage startup. It was the biggest bet I have ever taken in my career: I traded a successful company with a hot product that solves actual customer problems to join a group of people I didn’t know all that well but who had a great idea and developed very promising technology. The company had not been launched officially, the product was in beta and there wasn’t even a website. So why did I take the bet? What was so compelling about the Excelero technology?
I have had the honor of working with many people who were smarter than me and who had much more experience. I always made sure to listen as much as I spoke – which is no small feat for me – and I made sure to absorb all the conversations as much as I could. I shut up and listened, even when conversations seemed pointless or did not cover what I wanted to talk about. When I met Lior, Excelero’s CEO, for the first time, I did the same thing, I shut up and listened to his story, and what he said resonated very well with me.
Here’s the short version of his pitch:
“Every company wants to stop buying use case specific, hardware-based storage but they haven’t been able to because there is no alternative. Standard hardware with intelligent software is the operational vision of the cloud: any sever can serve any workload. SDN is a great example of how this can work: companies adopting SDN are living the dream and the competitive advantage this creates has given way to some amazing innovations while driving down costs. But how do companies apply this to storage? Customers have a lot of unanswered questions: Can I truly use a white box for production storage? How do I support my scale-out applications in an operationally sound way? How do I do more with less?”
I’m now 7 months in at Excelero and after launching the company officially last week, I am more confident than ever this was the right move. I’m proud to be a part of this team and proud that we enable customers to deploy scale-out storage with standard servers. The world you know it is about to change and things once thought only Google or AWS could do will now be a reality for any innovating enterprise. Here is a summary of how we do this:
- 100% Software delivered Virtual SAN: buy whatever x86 server you want and pursue a true multi vendor strategy
- Fully Restful API: we have customers doing “zero touch” deployments and provisioning
- Maximum storage utilization: minimize your overhead and use all available capacity
- Truly converged: move your compute to your storage, not the other way around
- Data center scale: designed to scale to thousands of servers
- No CPU Overhead: ensure deterministic application performance
- 100% flexibility: deploy in any configuration you want – converged (App/Client/Target on one server), or Disaggregated (Storage on a dedicated server) or BOTH
- Zero compromise: add what you need without the operational restrictions of solutions in the past or the restrictiveness of using media locally alone
If you want to learn more about how we do this, take a look at our presentations at “Tech Field Days”.
Thanks for reading, give me shout if you want to know more!
