With the Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics driving the need for more data storage, startups such as ClearSky Data, Inc. that are providing fully-managed global storage network solutions to help the enterprise keep up with its data demands are getting noticed and funded.

Ellen Rubin, cofounder and CEO of ClearSky Data, sat down for a one-on-one CUBEConversation with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about being a startup in Boston and the growing challenges of delivering enough storage to manage today’s Big Data crunch.

This week, theCUBE is highlighting Rubin in our Women In Tech feature.

High tech in Boston

Miniman began by discussing the success experienced by ClearSky Data in its first year. Rubin talked about funding and Boston-based partnerships.

“It’s been really exciting. Just a really, really busy year for us. Right after we launched and announced at VMworld, we actually raised $27 million in series B funding. It’s our second round; we raised close to $40 million in total, and it was led by Polaris [Partners] as a venture investor. And also we have Akamai [Technologies] as a strategic investor … and, of course, we have General Catalyst [Partners] and Highland Capital [Partners] from the first round, so it’s just a really good group of people who are involved.

“It’s funny when you think about it. It’s three Boston-based firms and a Boston, huge anchor company in Akamai. I think part of the opportunity and the excitement for people like myself is the infrastructure expertise that’s here and the fact that we are able to draw in people. … For us, this is where we stay because this is where the talent is.”

Legislative lowdown

Bringing up a hot topic in Boston that has been kicked around the Senate and the House, Miniman asked Rubin her opinion on overturning the non-compete legislation. Rubin remains positive and ready to tackle the challenge before it’s an issue.

“It’s a sad moment on that basis, but a tremendous amount of work got done and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to see progress. There was a strong desire for real reform, not just lip service, and the Senate really, I think, kind of nailed it exactly. The house was trying to do something that was more of a compromise, and they just couldn’t come to an agreement. So I’m hopeful that it will move forward.

“For me, what I like to say is there’s an opportunity for people in the startup world to make it a moot point, so we have removed all the non-compete language from our contract. We feel it’s not necessary to protect intellectual property, and really the mode is it’s not the most urgent issue in Boston that we should be focusing on per se; building big companies is the thing. It’s just one of those things that is just easy to fix. I’m disappointed we didn’t see the reform, but I hope we’ll see it next.”

Storage is a huge opportunity

Turning to machine data and the cloud, as well as taking advantage of the data, Miniman asked Rubin to elaborate on some of the challenges and opportunities she sees in these areas.

“More generally, Internet of Things is just a huge category, and it spans a lot of different industries. The piece that is interesting for us … in the operational side of the world is machine data that’s coming off of source systems, all of your IT infrastructure and your systems that are for monitoring and tracking what’s going on from a security perspective.

“What ends up happening is people know this but they don’t understand the magnitude of how much data gets generated. So it’s terabytes a day of data, so you end up very quickly with a petabyte problem. … Storage is a big piece of it, which is where the ClearSky piece of the story comes in. But I think what we are really seeing is this desire to be able to have all of the data that you need and to be able to access it. But you always need to be able to do that at high performance and low latency.

“Several companies ago … we use to talk about Big Data but of course we were talking about terabyte-sized problems, not petabyte-sized problems, and it was hard for me to imagine back then how much more the data growth was going to happen. And it’s all analytics driven. There’s a strong desire to figure out new ways that are more ‘cloudy,’ on-demand, scalable without having to buy racks of gear and to have to do all the old data center footprint. …

“People just don’t want to get rid of data for compliance, but a lot of the answers they’re looking for is hidden in the data. You start to see a thread of something that’s going on; you want to be able to pull the whole thing and really get to the bottom of whatever it is so you don’t have an outage or a security problem.”

Building Lego storage

Looking to Rubin’s experiences so far, Miniman questioned how she is getting the company’s arms around the storage challenge. Rubin explained that it depends on the size of the company and how much control it is ready to relinquish.

“I think they are looking for service providers that can make it easy. So the thing that is great about Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) is that there are so many inter-related services that they can take advantage of … but still its king of like Lego blocks – make your own and figure it out. There’s a desire by enterprises that don’t really have the skill sets … to figure out how to take advantage of those things without having to completely rebuild applications from scratch … or to turn to something that looks like a fully-managed solution.

“For a lot of the more custom applications where the enterprise still wants to have more control … they are going to use the public cloud. But they are going to need help. I think that the whole model of managed hosting has come back, and we’re certainly part of that trend where it’s truly on-demand, fully automated and much, much less expensive.”

Watch the full CUBEConversation below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE