TwinStrata

About TwinStrata

TwinStrata, Inc. operated as a provider of cloud-integrated storage technology, founded in 2007 by Nicos Vekiarides and John Bates. Vekiarides, the CEO, and Bates, the CTO, both brought experience from Incipient, a data storage company. Vekiarides, a veteran in the data storage industry, had previously held roles at Incipient, StorageApps (which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard), and Sun Microsystems, contributing to early storage virtualization solutions.

The company was established to address the challenges of data growth, offsite backup, and disaster recovery for businesses. TwinStrata developed the CloudArray product, a software and hardware appliance that enabled companies to connect their existing on-premise storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS) with on-demand cloud storage. This created a "Cloud SAN" that allowed clients to leverage the scalability and economic advantages of public clouds while maintaining the performance and security of local storage. CloudArray functioned as a cloud storage gateway, caching frequently accessed data locally while moving less-used data to the cloud, thus optimizing infrastructure costs.

The CloudArray solution supported a wide array of public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google, and Rackspace, making it a platform-agnostic choice for enterprises. Key features included disaster recovery-as-a-service, offsite data protection, tapeless backup, and AES-256 data encryption. The business model was based on selling these virtual and physical appliances, with some offerings like a free 1-terabyte version to attract users to platforms like Google Cloud Storage. Clients ranged from government entities like the Los Angeles Unified School District to other mid-sized companies.

After securing approximately $19.4 million in funding over several rounds, with Avalon Ventures as a key investor, TwinStrata demonstrated significant market traction. This culminated in its acquisition by EMC Corporation in July 2014 for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was a strategic move by EMC to integrate TwinStrata's CloudArray technology into its VMAX3 enterprise data service platform, enabling seamless cloud tiering for its customers.