Hedvig, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based storage software startup, shed its stealthy trappings today to debut the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform and announce that it had raised a total of $12.5 million in seed financing and a Series A funding round. Backers included True Ventures, Atlantic Bridge and Redpoint Ventures.
Hedvig is led by CEO and founder Avinash Lakshman, who is credited with co-inventing the Dynamo NoSQL cloud database during his stint at Amazon and the Cassandra distributed storage system at Facebook. “I saw the world of enterprise data centers striving to catch up with the world of Internet that I had come to know. So, with all of this on my mind, I decided to leave Facebook,” he said in a March 25 blog post.
His company’s goal is to imbue storage with “true distributed systems capabilities,” he added. Hedvig seeks to “make the power previously locked up in an Amazon, Facebook, or Google data center available to any enterprise at any scale.”
In true software-defined storage (SDS) fashion, the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform enables organizations to consolidate any type of storage, regardless of where it resides, into a virtualized pool of capacity. A Hedvig-managed environment can encompass on-premise, private and public cloud storage, and “scale from several terabytes to petabytes,” claims the company.
The technology can serve as the software foundation for hybrid clusters that can grow to thousands of nodes by plugging in commodity servers. Storage provisioning, management and policy implementation tasks can be performed in just a few clicks, versus hours or days, according to the company.
Essentially, the startup is seeking to do for enterprise data storage what modern data center approaches have done for today’s leading cloud computing companies. But Hedvig hit some bumps along that road, admitted Lakshman.
The company was readying its debut “more than a year and a half ago,” remarked Lakshman. Met with pessimism from industry experts, he added that “it didn’t make sense to publicize our company until our platform was proven and in production at several customer sites.”
Now, backed by some real-world experience, the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is ready for primetime, according to Lakshman.
“Enterprise data is arguably one of the most important business assets and we needed to earn our customers’ trust with a rock solid product,” he said in a statement. “Today we are proud to unveil our storage platform that looks like the infrastructure that Google, Amazon and Facebook run internally, but packaged to bring that capability to any enterprise data center.”
