Third-Party Report: Starwind Software
Virtualization Review magazine was born in two Framingham, MA-area restaurants -- Legal Seafood and Minado, an insanely great Japanese buffet.
Entrepreneurs are forever coming through Framingham (which ironically where half of the Redmond Media Group is based). These folks have to predict the future; otherwise they would blow their and their investors' money.
So selfishly I'd always ask what market they'd launch media in if they were me. Nine out of ten said virtualization. I mentioned this to my boss, Henry Allain, and before I knew it we were in full magazine and Web site launch mode.
Once the word was out, heads of virtualization startups started coming through town, and haven't stopped since. It's been a real education in technology, entrepreneurism and even culture. Turns a good number of these companies have roots in either Russia or Israel, and sometimes both! Learn more here.
That's a pretty long prelude to this item on Starwind Software, and my sushi lunch with CEO Zorian Rotenberg. Starwind is all about uptime for virtual machines, be they VMware or Hyper-V.
Like Virsto, which I covered recently here, Starwind helps IT replace expensive proprietary disk arrays with commodity white box disks made sophisticated through software.
Starwind takes industry standard servers and turns them into SANs using iSCSI rather than Fibre Channel, making it easier for the average IT Joe to handle.
There are a lot of smart people behind Starwind. Rotenberg used to work for Walter Scott, then CEO of Acronis, which does a lot of development in Russia. And Ratmir Timashev, founder of Aelita and now Veeam, is an investor and board member. Timashev was chosen as a Windows guru 3 years ago by Redmond magazine.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/23/2010 at 1:17 PM