Poojan Kumar, CEO and Co-founder at PernixData, discussed his startup’s vision of a software solution to the server performance issue of virtualization with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman, live at VMWorld 2013.

“VMWorld is an exciting time for us,” Kumar said. “Everything we do is centered around VMware, so this is the biggest event of the year for us.” PernixData was launched a year and a half ago, starting with just the two co-founders, and has become the fastest growing company in the enterprise storage space.

Commenting on how flash is changing storage architectures, Kumar said that the industry had moved from the physical Oracle databases to a virtualized world. “It’s really coming down to storage, can the SANs keep up?” This challenge is what inspired birth of PernixData.

See below for the full interview:

 
“Fundamentally, virtualization is really about coming up with a solution that can fix a problem from an infrastructure perspective,” he explained. The challenge is to build something that is not purpose-built, that can be agnostic to the applications that run on top of it.

“Everybody is trying to solve the storage performance problem created by virtualization,” he said. “You don’t need to solve it by asking customers to replace infrastructure.” Adding flash in the server, and allowing them to keep their existing storage infrastructure, and solve performance on a scale out manner on the server side is a better approach. Solve it with a software solution that is not disruptive from a customer adoption perspective. “We built a software platform that clusters flash in the server and works as a data exploration tier that works on top of storage and apps.”

Asked how execution changed the vision they presented to investors, Kumar said that initially, they had a vision: “we are going to give scale-out storage to everyone out there. There’s something different to give it in a product that works like a charm. You throw flash and virtual machines and it does exactly what you need, that was our vision.” The company since focused on taking that into an enterprise product. “Some of the folks who questioned us in the beginning, turned around and gave us a try,” he added.