Cirtas Systems

About Cirtas Systems

Cirtas Systems, established in 2008 by Allen Samuels and Dan Decasper, operated in the cloud storage gateway market before shutting down in 2011. The company was headquartered in San Jose, California, and aimed to address enterprise storage challenges by integrating public cloud storage into a company's existing infrastructure.

The firm successfully raised a total of $32.5 million in two funding rounds. The initial Series A round in September 2010 brought in $10 million from investors including NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Amazon. This was followed by a larger Series B round of $22.5 million in January 2011, led by Shasta Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, with continued participation from its earlier investors. Concurrent with the second funding round, Gary Messiana was appointed CEO, while co-founder Dan Decasper continued as Chief Technology Officer.

Cirtas Systems' core product was the Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, a hardware appliance designed for medium to large enterprises. The Bluejet controller connected to a company's storage area network (SAN) and acted as a gateway to public cloud storage providers like Amazon S3, Iron Mountain, EMC Atmos, and AT&T Synaptic Storage. This allowed businesses to use the cloud as a tier for their primary Tier 2 and Tier 3 data, as well as for backup and recovery, without needing to overhaul their existing systems. The Bluejet appliance featured an onboard caching system with RAM, SSD, and SAS drives to ensure high-performance access to frequently used data locally. It incorporated technologies such as data deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, and encryption to optimize storage efficiency and bandwidth usage.

The business model centered on selling the Bluejet hardware appliance, which came with a base license to store a certain volume of data, with options to purchase additional capacity keys. This model, however, did not include the ongoing costs of cloud storage and data transfer fees charged by the public cloud providers. Despite its technology and significant funding, Cirtas Systems ceased operations in 2011.