Cirtas

Cirtas Systems, a venture-backed (by NEA, LightSpeed Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Amazon.com), privately-held company based in San Jose, CA, was founded in 2008 by Dan Decasper and Allen Samuels. Its primary product, the Cirtas Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, is a cloud storage gateway device that enables the enterprise to seamlessly use public cloud storage utilities, such as Amazon S3, the Iron Mountain Archive Services Platform, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service and EMC Atmos for storing business data while maintaining enterprise storage array performance and functionality.

Cirtas’s Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers are targeted at the enterprise market, with pricing starting at about $70,000 per device.

On September 20, 2010, Cirtas emerged from stealth at the Storage Decisions conference with the debut of its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, available immediately through channel partners. Bluejet is an appliance that caches high-priority data locally while safely protecting all data in the cloud using WAN optimization technology. The 2U (3.5-in-high) appliance acts as a local cache that uses a combination of DRAM, solid-state drives and 7,200-rpm hard disk drives. The multiple tiers of storage are governed by automated algorithms that allow Bluejet to place data on the appropriate media based on access patterns to achieve the best performance. The Bluejet appliance offers data compression ratios of 2:1 to 3:1, depending on the data type, and a data de-duplication ratio as high as 50:1 for backup.

To date, Cirtas has raised $32.5 million USD in private funding. In September 2010 Cirtas announced that it received $10 million USD in A-round funding led by NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Amazon.com. In January 2011 Cirtas announced that it had raised $22.5 million USD in B-round funding, led by Shasta Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.

In 2010 Cirtas was named a Red Herring Top 100 North American Company for its innovative approach to make cloud storage work like traditional on-site storage arrays. In 2011 Red Herring further awarded Cirtas the 2010 Global 100 award, recognizing the hundred most promising private companies in the world.

In April 2011, Cirtas reduced its workforce by approximately 20 employees because "the product needed to be retooled for extensibility", according to CEO Gary Messiana. It was also reported that the venture capital companies funding Cirtas rescinded their investment in the company.

See also

• Cloud computing
• Cloud storage
• Cloud storage gateway