Tag Archives: storage

Event: Talk on Planet-Scale Distributed Storage by YouTube/PayPal architect Sugu Sougoumarane

Talentica Software invites you to a talk by Sugu Sougoumarane, a senior architect at YouTube, and co-founder of Youtube’s Vitess Project, which is an open-source scalable, distributed storage system that is used by YouTube for scaling.

The talk is on Friday, 8th July, from 3pm to 5:30pm, at Talentica Software, 4th Floor, Amar Megaplex, Baner Road. (Ample parking on Baner Road near the venue.) The event is free and open to all, but RSVP is necessary.

About the Speaker – Sugu Sougoumarane

Sugu is the co-founder of Youtube’s Vitess project, which has been under development since 2010. He hails from BITS Pilani and has been in the software industry for over 30 years. He has experience in a variety of fields including computer graphics, compilers, IDEs, databases, payments and software architecture. Prior to YouTube, Sugu joined X.com/PayPal in its early stages where he built many of its core features. He was also a member of the elite scalability team that was responsible for keeping PayPal scalable.

Abstract of the Talk

Sugu will cover the following topics as a part of his presentation

General Storage Concepts and Guidelines:

  • Computing trends: How distributed systems are changing the way we design software.
  • Challenges of distributed systems: Principles that govern the trade-offs.
  • How to practically apply these principles in real-life systems.
  • What is Paxos and how to tone it down when it’s not always needed.
  • How to make 2PC work, when it has always failed
  • Simplifying it all.

Vitess, the present and future

  • How was Vitess started and why we open-sourced it
  • Evolution of Vitess, from a connection proxy to a sprawled out planet scale storage solution. We are the real cockroach.
  • V3, the latest coolness
  • What’s in the future

Location, Fees, and Registration

The talk is on Friday, 8th July, from 3pm to 5:30pm, at Talentica Software, 4th Floor, Amar Megaplex, Baner Road. (Ample parking on Baner Road near the venue.)

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. However, seating at the venue is limited, so you must RSVP by sending a mail to rsvp@talentica.com.

Technology areas that IBM Pune Storage Team works on

Yesterday, Golbal CTO of Storage and SDE at IBM Vincent Hsu gave a tech talk. As part of that, Pankaj Bavishi, Program Director, Storage Development at IBM Pune put up a slide of the kind of technology that the IBM Storage team in Pune is working on.

I thought this was information that PuneTech readers might find interesting.

Storage areas the IBM Pune works on:

  • File System Development
    • Areas: Deep filesystem expertise, Cloud Tier using Active File Management
    • IBM Products: GPFS, AFS
  • Network Attached Storage (NAS) Development
    • Areas: Object Storage, Authentication & Security, File Protocols
    • IBM Products: SONAS, Storwize V7000 Unified, Spectrum Scale
  • Block Storage Development:
    • Areas: Protocls, Virtualization, Cloud Management & Protection
    • IBM Products: Spectrum Virtualize, Cloud Storage, Subsystem Device Driver
    • For example: iSCSI and FCoE implementations happened in IBM Pune
  • Storage & SDS Strategy – CTO Projects
    • Work with IBM Global Technical Experts (IBM Fellows and Distinguished Engineers)

IBM Initiatives in India:

  • Deeper connections with Top Tier Institutes (IITs, NITs, COEP, IISc, IIITs)
  • University Courses, Faculty Enablement, Joint Research
  • 20+ White Papers, Extreme Blue & Internship Projects
  • Paper Publications and Presentations in Top Storage Conferences and User Groups

Would you like to let PuneTech readers about what interesting technology work happens in your group in your company? Please mail us the information, and if our editors like it, we will feature it in PuneTech.

Note: Your write-up should be short, to-the-point, and written by a technical person, not a marketing person. And it should be unique or cutting edge technology – that not many other companies are working on.

Event: “Trends in Storage & Software Defined Environments” by Vincent Hsu, CTO of IBM Storage

Announcing a talk by yet another global CTO of a top tech company in Pune.

Earlier this week we had the CTO of Seagate in Pune. One week later, we have Vincent Hsu, CTO for Storage and SDE at IBM who will talk about trends in Storage and in Software Defined Environments.

The event will be on Tuesday, July 28th, at ICC Trade Center, SB Road. The schedule is as follows:

  • 5:30 – 6:00 pm Networking
  • 6:00 – 6:05 – Introduction
  • 6:05 – 7:00 pm – Vincent’s Talk
  • 7:00 – 7:15 pm – Q&A and closure

(There is parking at the venue, but you’ll need to budget 10 minutes extra for security and parking. We started this week’s event exactly on time, so please plan to reach a bit early.)

About the Speaker – Vincent Hsu

Vincent (Yu-Cheng) Hsu is Vice President, IBM Fellow, CTO for Storage and SW Defined Environments. His responsibilities include future storage technology, storage system architecture, design and the solution integration. Currently, he is technical leader on IBM Storage technology for big data, cloud storage and software defined storage infrastructure.

Mr. Hsu has devoted his entire 23 years of his career on enterprise storage system development. He is a master inventor at IBM. He was named an IBM Fellow in 2012. In 2005 he was named a Distinguished Engineer (executive level engineer) and Chief Engineer for IBM Enterprise storage. In 2009, he was named the CTO for IBM disk storage leading IBM storage technology council to oversee storage technology for all IBM disk storage products.

Mr. Hsu is a graduate of the University of Arizona, and holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Engineer and MBA degree. He is also a member of IBM Academy of Technology.

Fees, Registration, Logistics

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://punetech.eventbrite.com/?aff=punetech

The event is from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, on Tuesday, 28 July, at Hall #4, 5th Floor, A Wing, MCCIA, ICC Trade Tower, SB Road.

Event: Talks on Challenges in Storage Technology by CTO & VP of Seagate – 21 July

We have two visitors in town – Dr. Mark Re, CTO of Seagate Technology and Pravin Desale, VP of Product Development at Seagate – and we are taking this opportunity of arranging an event where PuneTech readers get to hear them talk about the latest challenges in the area of storage technology.

The event will be on Tuesday, 21 July, at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA, ICC Trade Tower, SB Road, and the agenda is:

  • 5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking: Snacks and tea will be served
  • 6:00pm-6:05pm: Introduction of the Speakers
  • 6:05pm-6:30pm: Pravin Desale’s talk “Managing Storage Solutions in the Era of Data Explosion”
  • 6:30pm-7:15pm: Mark Re’s talk “Challenges in Hard Disk Design and Manufacturing and Case for a Hybrid Drive”.
  • 7:15pm-7:30pm: Q&A

Talk #1: Managing Storage Solutions in the Era of Data Explosion – Pravin Desale

Data has evolved from static information stored and forgotten, to a living entity that drives every interaction of every day. We are creating solutions to fit the increasing needs and demands of our data-driven society. The demand is literally exploding and we need a vast range of storage solution to address needs of this data explosion.

In this talk, we will illustrate how different technologies from accelerators to flash solutions to HDDs to archival HDDs address needs of different markets, for variety of platforms in multitude of use cases.

About the Speaker – Pravin Desale

Pravin Desale is Vice President of Product Development at Seagate Technology. He is responsible for all ASSPs, ASICs, FPGAs and structured ASICs for Seagate’s Hard drives, Hybrid Drives, Flash Acceleration Cards and Solid State Drives. Pravin Desale is also responsible for guiding India investments of Seagate and management structure for India entity for the company. Pravin Desale and his management team joined Seagate as a result of acquisition of Flash Business by Seagate from LSI Corporation/Avago in 2014.

Prior to joining Seagate, Pravin held various roles at LSI Corporation/Avago ranging from VP of RAID storage product development to General Manager of LSI’s India operations. Pravin has been Founder/Engineering leader at a number of smaller companies that he helped acquire/integrate within fortune 500 companies such as LSI corporation, National Semiconductor in India and the US. Pravin continues to be active within venture community as well as has held fiduciary roles at emerging technology start up entities over past few years.

Pravin has 23+ years of professional experience ranging from research and development of storage, networking and multimedia/communication products to managing profit loss (P&Ls), operational and engineering competencies for global development centers.

Talk #2: Challenges in Hard Disk Design and Manufacturing and Case for a Hybrid Drive – Mark Re

Dr. Re’s talk will focus on the hard disk drive challenges; clarify some misconceptions and share industry and technology roadmaps. These roadmaps address the capacity and performance challenges for designing and manufacturing storage products. He will highlight key features in each of these technologies, including sharing a Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) video demonstration. He will make the case for the solid-state hybrid drives, which combine the speed of flash technology with the capacity and cost benefits of hard drives. He will also introduce enhanced cache drives, briefly comparing the architectural data flows between hybrid drives and enhanced cache drives- highlighting innovation behind increased performance.

About the Speaker – Mark Re

Mark Re is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Seagate Technology. He is responsible for all hard disk drive product and component research and development. Prior to his appointment as CTO on July 1, 2013, Re held many different roles within Seagate, including: SVP of R&D Media, Media Operations, and Heads R&D.

Prior to joining Seagate in 2003, Re served as SVP of Research and Development at Read-Rite in Fremont, California. Earlier career highlights include management positions at IBM in San Jose, California, and Yorktown Heights, New York, where Re’s primary focus was magnetic recording heads. During his tenure there, Re was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 1997.

Re holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.

About Seagate Technology

Seagate started off as a hard disk manufacturer – being the first company to develop the 5.25″ HDD – and quickly becoming one of the world’s leading brands of HDDs, but over the years it has extended its reach into other aspects of enterprise storage, and is now a leader in data storage solutions. The company provides hard disk drives, solid state drives, and solid state hybrid drives that are designed for enterprise servers and storage systems in mission critical and nearline applications; for client compute applications comprising desktop and mobile computing; and for client non-compute applications, such as digital video recorders, personal data backup systems, portable external storage systems, and digital media systems.

Seagate also offers data storage services, including online backup, data protection, and recovery solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. In addition, the company ships external backup storage solutions under its Backup Plus and Expansion product lines, as well as under the Samsung and LaCie brand names; Wireless Plus wireless drives; and network attached storage solutions under its Central, NAS, NAS Pro, and Rackmount NAS product lines. It sells its products primarily to OEMs, distributors, and retailers.

On March 12, 2013, Seagate announced that it was the first disk manufacturer to have cumulatively shipped two billion HDDs.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://punetech.eventbrite.com/?aff=punetech

The event is from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, on Tuesday, 21 July, at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA, ICC Trade Tower, SB Road.

Event: The Future of Scale Out Storage – by Ken Claffey VP&GM @ Seagate – 2 March

Seagate Technology, in conjunction with PuneTech and Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) presents a talk on The Future of Scale Out Storage by Ken Claffey, VP & GM of the Storage Systems Group at Seagate Technologies, on Monday, 2nd March, at 6pm, in Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

Abstract of the Talk

Big Data is changing the nature of storage infrastructure, traditional SAN and NAS systems are becoming obsolete. This disruption is creating opportunities for next generation scale out storage systems and converged infrastructure. Seagate as the world’s preeminent supplier of Disks Drives and Storage enclosures has a unique view point of this transition and the technology underpinnings that will be the foundation of a new data infrastructure designed to meet the challenges of big data. Seagate will present its view on this transition from the storage I/O device level all the way up the I/O stack to the application layer.

About the Speaker – Ken Claffey

Ken Claffey is Vice President and General Manager of Seagate’s Clusterstor™ HPC & Big Data business. Mr. Claffey led Seagate’s HPC initiative that started in 2009 and has led the successful execution of this strategy ever since. Mr. Claffey has also held senior management roles in Business Management, System Architecture, Business Development and Product Management functions at Xyratex, a storage and HPC technology company that was later acquired by Seagate. Prior to that, he held management positions at Adaptec and Eurologic Systems where he established and grew new businesses.

Venue

The event is from 6pm to 7pm on Monday, 2nd March, at the Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, Senapati Bapat Road.

Fees and registration

The event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here.

Converged Infrastructure: Talk by Bala Ganeshan, CTO QLogic

This is a live-blog of an event organized by Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), in which Dr. Bala Ganeshan, Vice President and CTO of QLogic Corporation talked about Converged Infrastructure, which has also been called as Integrated Systems, or Unified Computing Systems. Specifically, he focused on the idea of having compute, storage and networking into one preconfigured package which can be delivered to the data center. This approach provides a major transition that complements the shift to cloud and virtualized computing. These trends together with new I/O centric applications and solid state storage have the potential to revolutionize computing. Many IT organizations have started using converged infrastructure for various reasons ranging from centralized management of IT resources to consolidation to lowering costs. Gartner estimated the growth by more than 50% in 2014 over 2013 to reach $6 billion. Another research firm IDC estimates that, total worldwide spending on converged infrastructure will hit $17.8 billion in 2016.

The evolution of IT infrastructure for the data center

  • Initial system implementations for “open” infrastructure were inflexible, had CPUs with limited power, networking that was slow and unreliable, and storage was captive – it wasn’t easy to share data.
  • SANs (Storage Area Networks) evolved to address these limitations. Here, the data and storage was divorced from the servers, and powerful and flexible standalone storage systems were set up that could be accessed by any servers from anywhere else on the network. But SANs are complex and expensive, required specialised skills, relative high effort to provision new infrastructure, and ended up requiring lots of efforts to manage operationally in large environments. Over time, interoperability between different pieces of the SAN became more and more difficult.
  • Converged Infrastructure was a response to the problems with SAN. The focus of the new systems was ease of use, faster time to deployment, and ease of management.

Factors that drove the disruption of SANs and IT infrastructure:

  • Web Scale: Suddenly, the requirements on the IT infrastructure grew by orders of magnitude, requiring radically different solutions and architectures
  • Open Source: Putting pressure on proprietary solutions
  • Software Defined Networking in particular, and in general Software Defined Everything
  • Storage Scale-out: more storage generated in the last 2 years than the history of computing before that.
  • Server vendors started incorporating storage in their offerings
  • Storage vendors started building intelligence and apps in their hardware

Converged Infrastructure

  • No end user specialized skills required. No zoning, no LUN masking.
  • Automated provisioning: use of single-click, drag-n-drop interfaces for creating new storage and associating it with servers and applications
  • Tightly integrated management
  • Focused on application deployment: the business doesn’t really care about disks and LUNs and servers. They care about their sales orders, and websites, and SAP instances. So all management and deployment should be in terms of the applications, and the details of the underlying infrastructure should be hidden, and automatically handled by the system
  • Combines compute, network, and storage resources
  • Improves time to deploy new applications

Not all of these goals are easy to achieve, but any progress on any of these parameters is a huge improvement.

There are three approaches to converged infrastructure.

  • SAN based infrastructure
    • Where servers and storage an infrastructure unit contains a bunch of servers and the storage is hidden under the servers, and the servers expose virtualized storage
    • This gives a flexible architecture. Servers and storage can be expanded independently
    • Reduction in OpEx
    • Management is convoluted, and is at the level of the virtualized storage
  • Appliance:
    • Here hardware appliances contain both storage as well as compute nodes
    • The convergence across appliances is provided via a software management layer
    • Provides an Application Centric view to the users
    • Fixed granularity of scale – need to add appliances; can’t scale the storage without scaling the compute, and vice versa
  • Open Source Technologies:
    • The kinds of technology being built/used by Facebook/Google
    • This is currently a small fraction of the worldwide infrastructure
      market

A lot of small startups are playing in the “Appliance” space, because the ease of management is an important consideration in the SMB market. Larger, more established companies are doing SAN based converged infrastructure.

Other Points

Here is a random collection of interesting points made during the discussion, captured in no particular order:

  • Although the impact of the cloud has been growing, enterprises have still been slow to adopt the cloud. Security is one of the problems, but also the need to move lots of data across the network is a bottleneck. So, private clouds are getting good traction; and Microsoft is one of the companies that is responding quite well to this demand.
  • For now, applications like SAP will continue to be in-house and will not easily move to the cloud. This is notwithstanding the fact that SAP does run on the cloud – it’s just not an ideal setup. Initially, the applications that are moving to the cloud are things like websites, mobile apps, and other low-hanging fruit.

Panel Discussion

There was a panel discussion on converged infrastructure. The panelists were:

  • Aalop Shah: Technical Director at Druva; handling the laptop backup product.
  • Maneesh Bhandari: Angel Investor.
  • Nitin Deshpande: President, Allscripts India.
  • Viswanthan K: Vice President, Corporate IT, APAC, at Eaton Corp
  • Yogesh Zope: Group CIO for Bharat Forge Limited, and CEO of Kalyani Technologies.

Here are some of the comments made by the panelists:

  • Yogesh: For years, different companies have called this concept by different names. And yet, it is still not something that is really useful for a company like Kalyani. Converged Infrastructure and all this flexibility might be useful for a company that needs to handle big data and lots of unpredictability as far as the storage and compute requirements are concerned, but that is not really an issue for many companies. So we’re happy with the old style infrastructure. Another important point is that the whole issue of “manageability” is more of a consideration in the west. In India, talent is much cheaper, and we don’t have the same problems.
  • Bala: The needs and the trade-offs in the Indian market might be different. While some of the problems being solved by the current players in the converged infrastructure might not be pain-point in India, there are other problems that are faced here. So while the current players are not really addressing those requirements, at some point they’ll start addressing India and then they might make inroads in the market.
  • Vish: One of the aspects of this that has not yet been addressed is the power requirements. The data-center requires a lot of power, and the requirements of a converged infrastructure data-center are unique. We (i.e. Eaton) are now playing in this space, and providing “convergence” not just at the level of the software/hardware infrastructure, but at the level of the entire physical data-center, including the power.

Interview with Vaultize: Pune based Enterprise File Sharing and Sync Service

PuneTech has just learnt that Pune-based Enterprise file sharing and sync (EFSS) startup Vaultize has just received funding from Tata Capital Innovations Fund.

Vaultize builds cloud-based solutions for enterprise endpoint (i.e. laptop/desktop/mobile devices) sync, backup, encryption, security, and anytime/anywhere access to corporate file servers – all of this in a way that is visible to, and under the control of administrators in the company.

Through Vaultize’s endpoint encryption, sensitive corporate information remains encrypted on endpoints ensuring protection against unauthorized access and potential data leakage from lost or stolen device. In addition to on-disk protection, Vaultize’s patent pending encryption technology used in file sharing and backup ensures that the data is encrypted or decrypted only on endpoints – guaranteeing end-to-end protection

Vaultize, which so far has a presence only in India (with some sales outside via channel partners) will use the funding to scale up its expansion across the world, with immediate plans to establish operations in the US and Europe in conjunction with channel partners. The company will also use the funds towards building up its sales, marketing and engineering teams, and to enhance its global partner program.

PuneTech spoke with CEO and co-founder Anand Kekre. Here are some excerpts from the conversation:

Question: Another Pune startup in the storage and backup space, Druva.com, has been in the limelight in the last few years. How is Vaultize different?

Actually, we are not in the same market as Druva. Druva is more of a backup solution. Also, while they do have cloud-based backup, their focus traditionally has been on on-premise backup.

By contrast we are in what Gartner calls the EFSS (Enterprise File Sync and Share) space. We are more concerned with providing access to enterprise data from any device, from any where, without compromising on security. We ensure the enterprise data can be accessed from any device – including personal mobile devices – while at all times ensuring that the data is encrypted at all times, whether it is being sent over the network, or when it is stored on the disk in the device.

There are two major things we do that are unique to our solution. First, all the data that is being shared, synced, or in general being moved around via Vaultize is encrypted at source. This ensures that the data is never at risk once it leaves the device. Specifically, any data going over the network, or stored on Vaultize servers is always encrypted and the encryption key is only available at the endpoints (i.e. devices). Second, we do data de-duplication at source. That is, if the speed/latency and network bandwidth consumption is greatly improved by detecting whether the Vaultize servers already have a copy of the data that needs to be sent/synced (for example, same attachment being shared by various people), and only sending across the unique content. And this is achieved without losing the benefits of encryption-at-source, using patent-pending technology.

Question: So, your software can ensure that use of mobile devices with enterprise data is secure?

Across the world, there has been a proliferation of consumer file sharing and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trends, and this has resulted in an increase in data loss, security and compliance risks.

There are two different aspects to ensuring security for BYOD devices. First, the enterprise needs to ensure that it is safe to allow a mobile device to connect to the enterprise network – i.e. it is an authorized device, and it only has authorized applications, and more specifically, does not have viruses and malware. This area is called Mobile Device Management (MDM). Vaultize does not deal with this issue.

Once a device has been allowed to connect to the network, Vaultize ensures that the data on the device is safe and secure by encrypting all the sensitive data on the disk, by being able to sync data across various devices, and geographies, and by providing secure (via encryption) access to the data from anywhere, in a way that compiles with all the enterprise security policies.

And it does all of this in a way that can be easily managed and controlled by the enterprise IT administrators.

Question: What is your team size currently, and how are you planning on expand
ing it?

Currently, we are about 15 people, all in India. Over the next year, we hope to expand our team to about 30-35 people. We will be looking to expand not only in the area of sales and marketing, but also engineering, QA, and support.

For more information about Vaultize, see http://www.vaultize.com

PuneTech Event: Storage Technology Trends talk by Ken Boyd, IBM: 28 July

Ken Boyd, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, who has been building high end storage products at IBM for over 25 years, is visiting Pune and will talk about his thoughts on the trends in storage technology.

On Saturday July 28, 5pm, at MCCIA, SB Road, Ken will present some of the technology trends that are shaping the design of future storage systems in IBM. Ken will also discuss the opportunities these technology trends are creating for increasing the value of future storage systems. This talk is free and open to all those who’re interested in attending.

Ken is current Chief NAS (Network Attached Storage) Architect at IBM, and leads IBM’s NAS division. He is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and has been awarded the Master Inventor award, and holds over 40 patents.

Ken recently completed a two year IBM international assignment in Israel where he served as XIV Chief Architect. After IBM acquired XIV, an Israeli start up company, Ken led the XIV team in defining the future architecture and system design of IBM-XIV. Ken also led the technical integration of XIV into IBM.

Ken started his IBM career after graduating from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in with a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering. After beginning as an IBM logic designer, Ken held a variety of engineering and management positions in Poughkeepsie, NY before transferring to Tucson, AZ in 1987. Advancing in IBM’s storage development team in Tucson, Ken led several organizations, including hardware development, microcode development, technical support marketing, and product management. Ken made significant contributions to IBM high end storage products, including the IBM 3990 Storage Controller, the IBM Enterprise Storage Controller (now known as the DS8000 family), and the XIV Storage System. He was promoted to IBM Director in 1993 and was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2003. In July 2005 Ken received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for significant contributions to developing and protecting IBM Intellectual Property. Ken, named an IBM Master Inventor, holds over 40 patents and has achieved an IBM 12th Plateau Invention Achievement Award. Ken earned a M.B.A. degree from the University of Arizona and he is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

This is a free event, and anybody interested in technology is free to attend.

Registration and Fees

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Pune-based Druva get $12M in Series B from Nexus/Sequoia – This time its official

Pune-based Druva software, which makes enterprise backup software, has just cosed a $12 million round of funding from Nexus Venture Partners and existing investory Sequoia. In April 2010, they had raised $5 million from Sequoia and the Indian Angel Investors.

This funding is going to be used by Druva to make a strong push into cloud-based backup. Cloud infrastructure for a bandwidth and storage intensive like backup can be a significant expense, and of course, sales and marketing too.

A few weeks back a partially inaccurate version of this story had been leaked by Economic Times and was reported by PuneTech, but we “withdrew” the story after Druva called us up and let us know that it was premature to talk about it. Talking about a company’s funding round before everything is finalized and the money is in the bank is dangerous for a number of reasons including:

  • Funding is a tricky thing and there are no guarantees until the money is in the bank. Many things can, and do go wrong. One bad day on the stock market can cause VCs to reconsider any deals that are not final.
  • From the time the startup received a term-sheet from the VC until the deal is finalized, there is usually a no shopping clause which prevents the startup from talking about the details of the deal with anybody else. This is to ensure that the startup does not use this offer to try and create a bidding war between VCs. Hence, if the details leak out the VCs might feel that the startup is trying to violate the no shopping clause
  • Most importantly, if word leaks out that a VC is funding a company for amount X, then in next few days is is possible that the VC’s contacts in the industry (probably other VCs) keep saying “Why are you paying X? I don’t think it is worth more than Y?” and this can cause the VC to reconsider the deal. This is very dangerous for the startup.

This time however, the news is official (and is actually better than the deal reported by Indian Express).

As for what Druva does exactly, and why it is one of our favorite Pune companies, just read the previous article, which had a bunch of links. Here are some other interesting tidbits about Druva:

  • “Druva’s disruptive innovation reduces the storage footprint and bandwidth requirement for backup by orders of magnitude compared to other industry solutions” -Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Nexus
  • Druva, founded in 2007, has amassed more than 750 customers and protects more than 300,000 endpoints (i.e. servers, laptops, PCs) worldwide
  • InSync’s global, source-based deduplication reduces bandwidth and storage by 90 percent while providing 100 percent accuracy for Microsoft Outlook and Office applications

Here’s the full press release regarding this news

News of Druva’s funding was inaccurate and premature

On Friday, based on an Economic Times report, we reported that Pune-based enterprise backup software provider Druva has received $10 million in funding from Nexus VP. Unfortunately this news appears to be inaccurate.

Here is a comment from Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva:

Thanks Navin, but this news is not very accurate. This was unethically leaked and then misreported by Peerzada (abrar.shz@timesgroup.com) of ET for some cheap thrills.

Not sure when would people this these grow up and stop screwing lives of entrepreneurs who are already fighting against all the odds.

You have been a great supporter and I would give you a call sometime next week to give accurate information and some more good news.

Basically, Druva is indeed in an advanced stage in their second round funding process, but it is not done yet, and they cannot talk about the details of the amount or the investors involved. The details that came out in the ET report are inaccurate.

We wish Druva luck, and hope to hear the official good news sometime soon.