Scaling With VARs And OEMs: Nexenta CEO Evan Powell (Part 2)

Sramana: What year did you decide to jump in with Nexenta? There was a lot going on in storage from the early 2000s.

Evan Powell: It was in 2007. The venture industry is back on the storage bandwagon. I saw people starting to use the product who were knowledgeable and who were not driven solely by cost. I saw a gigantic market with a lot of gorillas around. They were not the vested players in the market, yet they had a huge interest in shaping it.

If you listen to what Intel is saying about the future of storage, you will hear them saying that they want to be more cost effective, more open, and based on industry standard hardware. When I looked at the storage industry, I heard big users like Stanford University telling me why they were using the very early alpha, pre-commercial versions of our product.

I knew the marketplace was not just about price. I also knew it was a huge marketplace. I then surmised what seems to be coming true, which was that Intel and others would invest heavily to transform storage. I saw it as a space that on the one hand looked crowded, where there are some great institutions selling legacy storage. On the other hand, I saw that the space itself was in need of a change and there were very large players like Intel that could dwarf the smaller players.

Legacy storage products are notorious for slowing down virtual desktops and cloud adoption. We had some giant users and GIS users. All of that technology does not get adopted if half of the price goes to a bunch of disks that run a proprietary file system running in a corner. What I saw was that storage had become the anchor of the IT industry. There were a lot of players who seemed interested in moving out, and that seems to have come to pass.

Sramana: Tell me a bit more about the validation phase of the business. How did you navigate the validation phase, and how did you get the business off the ground?

Evan Powell: Our founders, Alex Aizman and Dmitry Yusupov, came out of the Linux open source world. They had worked together since 2002 on Linux storage rules. They already had the beginnings of a community. They ended up contributing the critical storage function in Linux called open iscsi.

In 2004, Sun had made an open source file system. The file system is the foundation of storage. Theirs was not just as good as the legacy file systems used by the legacy vendors, but it was better than their file systems. Our founders grabbed that back in 2004 and spun it into an open source distribution and got tens of thousands of open source users. By the time I got involved there were more than 40,000 open source users of our core product. They did not have all the pieces on top of it that turned it into a true storage system; nevertheless, that was the starting point.

Stanford was one of those users. When I chatted with them, they pointed out that if we wrote a user interface and a few other must-have storage features and added them on top of the open source core then we would have a product that would displace the high end legacy storage systems at Stanford. We took that advice and we tried to harness the open source seed into a viable commercial, trustable produce. We released the beta in late 2007 and had our first commercial sale in April 2008.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Scaling With VARs And OEMs: Nexenta CEO Evan Powell
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