Startup PernixData virtualizes server-based flash

PernixData, a startup founded by VMware veterans, says its software can turn server-based flash storage into a resource shared across a standard VMware cluster of as many as 32 systems.

Making that cache available across a whole cluster will let enterprises scale out their storage capacity with consistently fast access to data, according to co-founder and CEO Poojan Kumar, who previously managed VMware's data products. PernixData's product, called PernixData FVP (Flash Virtualization Platform), works without modifications to the hypervisor or applications and is designed to coexist with SANs (storage area networks), he said.

Putting flash storage directly into servers is a growing solution to the need for faster access to data, but the technology's been limited to individual servers, so virtualized environments can't fully take advantage of it, according to PernixData. Clusters of virtualized servers typically share data over a SAN, which can raise performance problems, Kumar said. Multiple network hops and contention over a shared SAN link can all slow down access to the data that applications need.

PernixData's software can turn flash cards on all the servers in a virtualized cluster into a shared cache, which serves as a tier of storage above a SAN for the most-used data. It's a software-only product and can use on-server flash that customers already have deployed. Announced on Tuesday, PernixData FVP is available immediately for US$7,500 per host for an enterprise package. It's initially for VMware environments, though ultimately it will work with multiple hypervisors, including KVM and Microsoft's Hyper-V, Kumar said.

The software is designed to allow fast access to data while virtualizing server resources. The virtual machines on a given server mostly will get their data from the cache right on that system. But even when they need to tap into another server on the cluster, that will be faster than going out to a SAN, the company said: Delays can be measured in microseconds rather than milliseconds. And PernixData works with all features of VMware, such as movements of VMs using VMotion, making management easier, Kumar said.

Another advantage to PernixData's approach is that administrators can control which VMs can use which flash resources, giving preference to the jobs that most need the performance. It does this by taking advantage of both the VM and the storage being on the cluster, so that kind of control isn't possible with flash that's on a SAN, Kumar said.

Christopher Greater Area Rural Health Planning Corp. (CRHPC), which operates 13 clinics in southern Illinois, sees PernixData's software as key to implementing VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) for its doctors and other employees.

VDI should cut maintenance and energy costs while helping ensure security and giving workers more flexibility, said Jason Rolla, chief technology officer. For example, doctors frequently move between their offices and examination rooms, he said. "Technically, they could carry their office everywhere they went," Rolla said.

CRHPC has an almost four-year-old Dell EqualLogic storage array in its headquarters data center that's connected to its servers via iSCSI. But when it tried to set up VDI using just the array for storage, application response times were much longer than the 3 milliseconds that CRHPC was aiming for, Rolla said.

Tests with 10 virtual desktops showed that using the cache with PernixData will cut down on response time by about three-quarters, and CRHPC now plans to implement the software in its full VDI rollout, Rolla said.

PernixData should be useful for databases and big data analytics, as well as VDI, said Gartner analyst Chris Wolf. Virtualized storage products from some other vendors, including VMware, have been hard to sell because they were too expensive for what they did, he said.

"As long as the product holds up to what it appears to do on paper, Pernix is going to put a lot of price pressure on some of the more industry heavyweights here," Wolf said.

Yahoo buys Chinese startup Ztelic to boost R&D

Yahoo has made yet another acquisition, this time picking up Beijing-based data analysis startup Ztelic to boost its research and development efforts in China.

The deal, announced Thursday, is Yahoo's second acquisition in two days and its 19th since former Google executive Marissa Mayer was made CEO of Yahoo a year ago this week.

Ztelic developed a software product for analyzing and monitoring activity on social networks. Yahoo said it bought the company for the engineering talent, which has been the motivation for a few of its recent buys.
"As part of our investment in our R&D efforts, we're bringing on a talented team of eight developers and engineers from Ztelic," Yahoo said in a statement via email.

Ztelic was founded by Hao Zheng, who formerly was chief architect at Yahoo's R&D labs in China and who also worked at one time for games developer Zynga in Asia, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He's now returning to Yahoo, where he'll play a "critical leadership role" at its R&D center in Beijing, Yahoo said. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.

It's been a busy week for Yahoo. On Monday it reported its quarterly earnings, which showed a jump in profit but declining revenue. Two days later, it said it had bought Admovate, which makes technology to improve ad targeting on smartphones.

Facebook to acquire UK startup Monoidics

Facebook is to acquire UK startup Monoidics, which makes code verification and analysis tools and specialises in detecting coding errors.

The tools are aimed at helping developers to deliver bug-free code, improve security and identify critical components and areas of risk.

Facebook has not disclosed the value of the deal, but once it closes, the Monoidics technical team will join Facebook’s engineering team in London, according to a statement on the company’s website.

“Joining the Facebook team opens up a world of new opportunity for our technology and for our individual and collective scientific expertise,” the statement said.

Monoidics was founded in 2009 by Italian entrepreneur Dino Di Stefano, and is based in London's Silicon Roundabout area around Old Street, with offices in Seattle and Tokyo.

Through the acquisition, Facebook is seeking to improve the reliability of its mobile apps, which have been criticised for being slow and unreliable, according to the Telegraph.

Facebook has begun upgrading its smartphone apps regularly as its 1.1bn users increasingly access the social networking site through mobile devices.

The acquisition of Monoidics will allow Facebook to improve the speed at which it can verify that the apps are secure and bug-free.  

Puppet acquires DevOps startup Cloudsmith

Open-source IT automation software vendor Puppet Labs has acquired Cloudsmith, which provides tools and services that can help administrators and developers more easily use the Puppet software.
Puppet bought Cloudsmith both for its technologies and its engineering expertise, said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. All seven of Cloudsmith’s employees will continue to work for Puppet, he said.
“They built developer-like tools for an operations world, taking developer workflows to help operations people work in a mixed developer/operations world,” Kanies said.

Puppet is a well-known name in the emerging practice of DevOps, which seeks to shorten development time of software by having software developers work more closely with system administrators and other IT operations staff.

The New York-based Cloudsmith offers two products, both of which complement Puppet’s own IT automation software.

Cloudsmith’s Geppetto is a graphical user interface-based editor for building and publishing Puppet modules, one that runs as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE (integrated developer environment).
Puppet relies on the use of modules, or bundles of code and data that provide Puppet with the instructions to automate routine operations such as software updates and new server deployments. Puppet Labs and software vendors provide some of these modules, and users also create their own.

Geppetto offers syntax highlighting, content assistance, error tracing and debugging, all based on the Puppet module DSL (domain specific language).

Puppet has offered its own plug-ins for editing Puppet modules, most notably for the Vim and Emacs editors, though those were written primarily for operations folks, Kanies said. Geppetto, a plug-in for Eclipse, “fits the core developer market very well,” he said.

Puppet will relaunch Geppetto next month at PuppetConf, the Puppet user conference to be held in San Francisco on Aug. 22 and 23.

Cloudsmith also offers Stack Hammer, a service for integrating, testing and deploying collections of software, including sets of Puppet modules, as pre-assembled stacks. Customer stacks are stored on GitHub, which users can then run on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute).
Stack Hammer eases the developer burden of deploying software for testing and production, by providing the pre-built stack of software needed to run the program.

At this time, Puppet hasn’t disclosed its plans for Stack Hammer.
“The core technology absolutely will resurface,” Kanies said. “We will provide far more services in the cloud, and Stack Hammer will be the heart of that.”

Created in 2005, Puppet Labs offers software for managing an organization’s computers and software. The software provides a declarative language that administrators can use to specify machine configurations, which then can be used to automate reoccurring deployment and maintenance routines.
In January, VMware invested $30 million in Puppet.

Terms of the Cloudsmith acquisition were not disclosed. 

Startup profile: Clear Returns

Clear Returns is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that provides online retailers with real-time information on their products and customers. It analyses data to pinpoint problems with the returns process to minimise spend and improve customer service.

CEO of the startup, Vicky Brock, discovered that it was normal for fashion retailers to have return rates as high as 40%. “It’s clearly a massive problem to business growth, and it is not sustainable long term,” she said.

Clear Returns' technology is split into two solutions: Eco, which looks at products; and Seer, which analyses customers.

Eco provides a view of the business profitability. Brock said that 50% of returns are driven by certain key items, so Eco shows the retailer patterns in the items and returns. The retailer can set alerts to know if a certain item is being returned more than another, which can help it spot problems and reduce costs.

If a customer adds a problem item to their online basket, the retailer can trigger helpful services, such as the virtual dressing room, allowing customers to make sure the product is right for them.

This article is part of a series where Computer Weekly aims to connect CIOs with technology startups.

If you are thinking of looking for technology solutions from small innovative companies, but are not sure where to look or how to approach them, you may be interested in our UK startups articles.

This guide provides you with everything you need to know about startups in the UK, with news, business profiles and advice on starting relationships with UK startups.

“It helps buying decisions, quality control and stock ordering,” she said. “Our data is coming in near real time. Without [Clear Returns], retailers usually get that information eight to 10 weeks after. It would come from e-commerce and the warehouse, then to an excel spreadsheet, and then be worked through at the end of the month and reported into the organisation.”

Seer, on the other hand, analyses customer returns behaviour.

“Most customers are good customers who buy because they want the product. If they have a bad returns experience, you kill off that relationship,” said Brock

But Seer can also analyse the “bad customers” who return at a higher than normal rate. This includes customers who wear an item once before returning it to gain a refund. The analytics can pinpoint customers who regularly buy the same type of product but always return, and then it is up to the retailer to decide on a course of action, such as stopping the suggestion pop-up adverts going to that particular customer to reduce the chance of them buying something they’ve bought before.

Brock explained that in a low-stock environment, where there might be only a couple of pieces left, people who have no intention of keeping it can be identified by the retailer, which can then make sure that a loyal customer gets the first pick.

“That’s a negative scenario – the majority of scenarios are positive, because the majority of customers are good positive loyal customers, and returns is a negative customer experience,” said Brock. “In a low-stock environment, retailers have to buy 20% more stock to keep an item in stock because of the high number of returns.”

Clear Returns uses data mining and predictive technology to analyse stock and customers.

Brock chose IBM’s predictive analytics software SPSS, which runs on the Amazon cloud. It takes information from the e-commerce platform, warehouse stock numbers and operation systems, and then predicts which product will be returned based on sales and return patterns.

Brock said that if its SaaS product helps to reduce returns by two percentage points, that will equate to a 1% increase in profit.

“We’ve just done a trial with a relatively small but international fashion brand, and we found that £1m in transactions were coming from returners buying the same items every couple of weeks – wear and returners – and another £400,000 of returns was simply down to mismatch of description,” she said.

As well as cost savings, the platform can provide an insight into the returns process for customers and help retailers improve customer satisfaction.

“If you delight a few more customers and turn them into loyal shoppers by making the process right and giving a really high-value service, you’re actually going to have an impact on revenue as well as savings."

A retailer can choose either Eco, Seer or both solutions as a SaaS model.

Clear Returns initially takes a few months of extractive data from the retailer to gain an understanding of its taxonomies and various classifications. It then takes feeds from all the different systems to analyse and predict product returns.

The retailer can then access the analytics via a browser login.

While Brock has designed the platform with fashion retailers in mind, the algorithms also work for other retailers, such as those selling sporting goods, jewellery and DIY.

“I started with fashion first because the return rates are truly eye-watering,” she said.

Clear Returns has just secured the clothing and household store M&Co as a customer. M&Co has more than 300 stores in the UK and a growing e-commerce platform which also sells internationally.

Brock set up Clear Returns in May 2012, and the company was enrolled in Entrepreneurial Spark, a Glasgow-based incubator. Entirely self-funded, it was also supported by the Scottish government, which helped Brock attend the MIT Global Entrepreneur Development Program – a bootcamp for high-growth tech entrepreneurs.

She then took part in IBM’s SmartCamp in Dublin, which supports startups with ongoing strategic development and mentoring.

The next step for Clear Returns is to scale its business into other geographies, and it is currently raising £1m in investment.

Ex-Business Objects CEO's startup focuses on workforce analytics

After leaving his post as CEO of SAP’s Business Objects division about three years ago, John Schwarz had a revelation.

Before him, Schwarz said in a recent interview, was an opportunity to “redo BI from a clean sheet of paper.” That thought led to the formation of Visier, an analytics software provider where Schwarz serves as CEO.

While Schwarz was at Business Objects, customer satisfaction surveys found that the vendor’s BI software was well-liked among IT users, “but you talk to the actual business users and the results were far less satisfactory,” he said. “IT could get the tools up and running, but then they flipped it over to the end user and they said, ‘it’s too difficult.’”

Visier’s approach from the beginning was to “throw the whole BI technology idea out and start at the other end of the spectrum,” Schwarz said. “Start with the user and go back to the data. As long as you can start up a browser, you can use our application.”

Beyond creating an attractive user interface for Visier’s cloud-based software, Schwarz and his team sought to boost user productivity by initially focusing on a single domain: workforce analytics.

With the launch this month of version 10 of Visier’s software, the platform will contain some 300 prebuilt visualizations and analysis tools that cover “the top metrics and questions people have in the [human resources] world,” he said.

For example, the Visier system can help human resources staffers analyze which current employees may be at most risk of leaving the company, based on historical data regarding the attributes of workers who previously left.

It’s also possible to share the results of analyses with others by exporting information to slideshows.

Visier also promises customers a much speedier and happier experience on the implementation side. New customers can be up and running within four weeks, compared to more than a year for traditional on-premises BI projects, according to Schwarz.

The cost of Visier’s software is also “an order of magnitude” lower than a traditional BI project, he said.

Later this year, Visier will release a new application for workforce planning, which will allow users to model, predict and assess future staffing scenarios. The company is also planning to create analytic applications for additional domains, such as sales, marketing and finance, Schwarz said.

In addition, Visier will seek out third parties to build on top of its platform, which uses MapReduce along with a range of homegrown technologies under the hood, along with HTML5 and Flash on the front end, according to Schwarz.

Visier has about two dozen customers, most of them larger companies such as ConAgra. While Visier is capable of running globally, the company won’t have data center operations outside of North America until later this year, Schwarz said.

It competes with fellow workforce analytics specialist OrcaEyes, as well as products from BI platform providers such as SAP, Oracle and IBM.

While “it would be a bit of a stretch” to say customers can’t get capabilities like Visier’s anywhere else, the company has a “very strong product,” said analyst Stephan Millard, vice president and research director at Ventana Research. “What they’ve done is prepackaged everything people want in human capital analytics.”

One potential risk to customers is the possibility Visier will be acquired at some point by a larger vendor.

In general, the HCM (human capital management) software market “has been consolidating for a while,” and it stands to reason Visier will get looked at by SAP, Oracle, Workday, he said.

Microsoft consolidates startup support activities with Microsoft Ventures

As its annual Build development conference gets underway, Microsoft is announcing that it has shuffled and revamped the way it handles its startup support activities. A number of disparate programs have been tied together under a single, unified division within the company, called Microsoft Ventures.

 

Tech veteran Rahul Sood, who joined Microsoft in 2010 from Hewlett-Packard, announced the launch in a blog post that outlines the numerous changes the company is making to the way it supports entrepreneurs. He calls the new unified division "a coordinated global effort that offers the tools, resources, expertise and routes to market by providing mentorship, technology guidance, seed funding, joint selling opportunities and other benefits." Whew!

The three pillars of Redmond.

What's changing? The updates focus on three major areas.

 

First is the long-running BizSpark program, which was established in 2008 and is now being folded into Microsoft Ventures. BizSpark provides free access to Microsoft software design and development products, as well as training services, for a period of three years to relevant startups and other partners. To date, 45,000 companies have taken advantage of the offer. Under Microsoft Ventures, this program isn't significantly changing, but it will be now managed by Ventures directly.

 

Next, the new Microsoft Ventures Accelerators is an expansion of the company's current international accelerator program, bringing locations in Germany, Russia, and Brazil into the fold. This "immersive" program, which lasts for up to six months, is available to full-time tech startups that have less than $1 million in total capital raised. Those selected into the program get mentoring from Microsoft, tech development and design help, and various tools and resources to help them get underway. 114 companies to date have graduated from the accelerator program, and, per Sood, nearly all have received funding subsequently. The new announcement brings the total number of accelerator offices worldwide to eight.

 

Lastly it comes down to cold, hard cash. Less than a year ago, Microsoft launched the Bing Fund as a way to provide early-stage venture capital to very new companies, offering (for Microsoft, anyway) chump change in the amount of $50,000 to $100,000 to the startups it took an interest in. Bing Fund recipients also got access to design and development aid and could even take office space on the Microsoft campus. Now the Bing Fund is getting an upgrade (and the name itself has been retired). It's unclear how much additional money is being funneled into the VC program, or if a formal cap has even been set. (The Bing Fund, according to its CrunchBase profile, invested in only about a half dozen startups in its first year of operation), but The Next Web reports that Sood might be looking for slightly more mature companies to receive investments going forward.

 

This expansion of its startup-focused efforts is a smart move for Microsoft and a solid lead for tech startups seeking financing. The company notes that recipients need not be focused on Microsoft or its technologies, though it's clear that incorporating something out of Redmond into your business plan won't hurt your chances of being selected.