Get ready for another “as-a-service.”

Hyper-converged systems startup Gridstore Inc. said it has merged with application migration specialist DCHQ Inc. to form a new company called HyperGrid Inc. that plans to deliver what it calls the first hyper-converged infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

Gridstore raised more than $44 million, including a $19 million funding round in January, for its all-flash appliance. It claims to be growing at a 340 percent clip this year. The company was founded in 2007 as a flash storage vendor, but pivoted in late 2014. Since then, Gridstore said it has doubled its customer base in a crowded market with a unique sales proposition based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V, rather than VMware Inc.’s ESXi hypervisor, and support for Microsoft virtual desktop infrastructure.

The acquisition of DCHQ adds technology for moving applications to cloud or container infrastructure. DCHQ’s HyperForm software enables development and test teams to quickly move applications back and forth between on-premise and cloud environments, including Docker, Mesosphere, VMware vSphere, KVM, Hyper-V, bare metal, OpenStack, the Hebergement OVH Inc. Corp. cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Users can test various deployment scenarios and then convert the best ones into templates that can be migrated to other environments.

The company will continue to sell its hyper-converged appliances as an adjunct to the cloud platform. “We’ve removed the need for a single type of hypervisor or the need to do everything on prem,” said Nariman Teymourian, who was appointed chairman and CEO following the most recent funding round. “More importantly, we’ve given you flexibility. You choose to be on the cloud and migrate your workload onto an appliance that you plug into the wall.”

The self-configuring local appliance takes only about five minutes to configure itself, he said. “Now you have a predictable infrastructure available with a set of templates you can assign to end users, allowing them to spin up instances on their own. ”

Template-driven deployment

Developers can work with their own tools and move resulting applications into a test instance or multiple containers for simultaneous testing. “IT can avoid all the management functions associated with that test,” Teymourian said. “IT operations can use an application deployment template to deploy that app onto another node or a target cloud.”

Asked what the difference is between hyper-converged-infrastructure-as-a-service and a standard Amazon EC2 instance, Teymourian said, “With hyper-converged IaaS you get a significantly more scalable environment with significant cost benefits.” He said he expects small and midsize business customers to primarily buy the cloud service through channel partners, while enterprise customers will want a combination of cloud and physical servers. HyperGrid offers a choice of hyper-converged infrastructure based on servers from HP Enterprise, Dell Inc. or Super Micro Computer Inc.

HyperGrid doesn’t publish pricing for its appliances, but a November, 2015 article on StoragePricing.org cited a $98,000 price for a three-node hybrid with 24 terabytes of hard disk capacity and three terabytes of solid-state disk cache.

Image courtesy HyperGrid