UPDATED 15:05 EDT / OCTOBER 11 2016

NEWS

Igneous Systems launches on-premises cloud data service

For all the computing activity that’s moving to the cloud, many companies need to maintain some of their systems and data in their own data centers — either because they’re generating too much to move easily into the cloud or because they don’t want to risk exposing their crown jewels. But they still want all the benefits of the cloud, such as new data-intensive services with no capital costs.

That reality is spawning a host of services, the latest of which is Igneous Systems Inc. The Seattle-based startup is launching what it calls the Igneous Data Service, which lets customers install purpose built appliance in their data centers to content storage service that is API compatible with Simple Storage Service, Amazon Web Services storage service.

This hybrid cloud approach isn’t entirely new. Traditional enterprise hardware and software companies ranging from Oracle Corp. and VMware to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. and Dell Technologies Inc. are angling for a piece of the market. So are upstarts such as CloudZero, Scality, Platform9 and the newly public Nutanix.

Unlike traditional data center suppliers and even some private cloud providers, however, Igneous manages the hardware and software itself, so the system works much like the public cloud. The company is focused currently on the challenge of large-scale data storage, supporting AWS’s S3 storage standard. But the design of the services will allow for future services to manage new data pipelines through serverless computing, stream processing, event driven computing and container services.

Hybrid cloud model for data-intensive computing

Customers don’t buy or manage the hardware or software, instead paying an annual subscription starting at $40,000 a year for Igneous to maintain it all, working like a public cloud service. Customers such as Wall Street trading firms often want to keep data in-house because it costs too much or takes too long to move it back and forth between public clouds and long-established legacy systems they run their business on. Other companies need to maintain data on-premise because of regulatory or security requirements.

We bring the value of the cloud to applications inside their data center,” co-founder and Chief Executive Kiran Bhageshpur (above) said in an interview. “The enterprise world today is nowhere close to that level of automation.”

The company has been in production with early customers since May. One potential customer cited by Igneous is Northeastern University, which said traditional storage systems soon will not be able to handle its data storage and curation needs. With Igneous, said Rajiv Shridhar, director of systems and production services at Northeastern, “we can see a path forward to not only collect and store data but also enable the development of new enterprise and research applications utilizing large, unstructured datasets.”

The company’s founders and early employees hail from “hyperscale” storage companies such as Isilon Systems Inc, EMC Corp., NetApp Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AWS. The company, which holds 11 patents, has raised a relatively modest $27 million so far from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Madrona Group, RedPoint and Isilon founder Sujal Patel.

The bottom line is that big enterprises have problems moving large datasets that can be several petabytes per hours to the cloud. By helping them avoid having to do that but still get the benefits of cloud computing, Igneous hopes to grab a position in the lucrative hybrid cloud market.

Here’s an exclusive video interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s video unit theCUBE, with Bhageshpur and SiliconANGLE Media co-CEO John Furrier:

Photo by theCUBE


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