SiliconANGLE’s Kristen Nicole covered the launch of FlashSoft, a Sunnyvale California startup.  At the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara I sat  down with the FlashSoft founders Ted Sanford and Serge Shats to talk about their business and traction.

FlashSoft has a bright future as as rising startup.  FlashSoft has three things going for them:  1) a hot growing market with lot of available marketshare in the mid to high-end, 2)  their first set of products solves an immediate customer problem, and 3) they increase performance and lower the costs for their customer infrastructure.

Storage is sexy but Cache is King.

SSD hardware is getting faster and cheaper every day.  This explosion of innovation in SSD has led to massive innovation that we saw in the massive growth in size and functionality of handheld phones.  Now SSDs are going to another level of innovation where software on “commodity” hardware is emerging as the leading solution cache solutions such as FlashSoft and FusionIO.

I had a chance to sit down with David Floyer of Wikibon and the FlashSoft founders Ted Sanford and Serge Shats with their VP of Marketing Rich Petersen joining the fray.

The founders of FlashSoft Ted and Serge have spent 20 years starting and selling companies as founding tech entrepreneurs. Now they are back together to find the “cash in cache.”    What got them back on the “startup heroin” – the surge in flash and SSD.  They saw the  disruption in the enterprise coming fast.  To Ted Sanford it was clear – flash was going to disrupt the enterprise big time.

Software is clearly becoming the disruptive force across all tech sectors.  In the storage business cache is king.  SSD is the hottest area of disruption.  As the megatrend of high density comes to flash especially in speed and robustness, cache and high volume of transaction data or  “hot data” is changing the game for the big server vendors like HP, Dell, and IBM not to mention their customers in the enterprise.  The market is demanding that CPU, memory, and storage all be solid state and  in the server.

As the applications push into the cloud, FlashSoft is providing 3-10x in speed performance with their flash software.  As a startup the best thing you want is your first product that solves a problems that no one else can and one that also saves their customers money.

FlashSoft founded in 2009 in stealth where they just shipped their first product in Q1 2011 and officially launched in June 2011.   FlashSoft was bootstrapped and seed financed with $500k.  FlashSoft managed to get lots of customers up and running while in stealthmode.  Just recently they announced new funding from Thomvest Ventures in the amount  of $3 million.

FlashSoft  can support shared storage regardless of a customers cluster model – either horizontal or vertical cluster.  Another nice advantage of FlashSoft is the read write persistent cache.  Last year we saw the rise of  Flashcache an opensource project at Facebook as a solution.

FlashSoft uses a the circular buffer design.  Most solution employ a traditional buffer.   A circular buffer design provides big performance increases and utilization improvements thus speeding up end user performance and decreasing the costs of equipment.

One area that is growing fast is meta data.   Flashsoft’s approach to handling meta data is strong.  With FlashSoft all meta data goes in SSD, but “hot meta data” goes into memory.   FlashSoft does includes mulitlevel meta data management-  footprint in memory,  lightweight memory and CPU utilization, and performance tuning on all SSD hardware– FlashSoft calls it performance profiling.

My Angle on FlashSoft:

The management team is smart and experienced.  I love how they bootstrapped their business and took a modest round from the venture capitalists.  On the mojo side I like how FlashSoft wants to attack a large problem.

The big problem is how to leverage flash as a cache thus attacking the IO bottleneck that is choking the end user productivity in today’s corporate enterprise.  Flash storge is changing the performance and economics in that most enterprises.  This flash memory and SSD trend sits at the core of the innovation cycle of infrastructure convergence and the consumer application explosion makes it very hot.

FlashSoft has a bright future as as rising startup – a hot growing market with lot of available marketshare in the mid to high-end; their products solves an immediate customer problem, and they lowers the cost for their customer infrastructure.

Storage is sexy but Cache is King.