Ursheet Parikh and Guru Pangal’s office in Santa Clara is quite abuzz with activity. Their company’s break through offering is setting new standards in the cloud storage space since they left Cisco and Brocade to start StorSimple. Their initial investors were Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

Since the early days the momentum has grown and grown. With large industry leaders like Microsoft and VMWare certifying its cloud storage offering - the company has uniquely achieved the most stringent “Certified for Windows Server 2008” level of certification and also VMware Ready status. StorSimple was recently named the Microsoft BizSpark Partner of the Year, is a Silver award winner in Storage Magazine’s Products of the Year and was identified by Gartner as a cool vendor. Having won a slew of recognitions and awards in such a short time, it is indicative of the momentum the company has. It should come as no surprise that having already secured two rounds of venture funding in the last two years, the company has just closed its third round of funding from its investors — Ignition Partners, Index Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Redpoint Ventures, bringing the total funding to a cool $31.5 million. Richard Fade of Ignition Partners who led the third round summarizes the potential of StorSimple well. “History has shown first movers with great breakthrough products capture disproportionate value for their customers and investors - we believe StorSimple to be just such a company. StorSimple is a company we wanted to become a bigger a part of. It has an awesome team, a proven product, early market leadership and deep partner relationships with companies such as Microsoft, who recently selected StorSimple as a Partner of the Year.”

Up until now, large enterprises either stored all their data in a datacenter, on-premise, investing millions of dollars in a storage infrastructure, or hosted it completely in the cloud. But this posed quite a challenge because a traditional storage device created a barrier when the volume of data grew rapidly while a cloud always created an aura of uncertainty in operations.

Founded in 2009, StorSimple is driving a new trend in the storage market by providing an on-premise enterprise cloud storage appliance. Storage requirements are growing at 60 percent to 70 percent year-on-year and this can drive storage CapEx and OpEx to grow at similar rates. In reality only a small percentage of data, called the working set, gets regularly used. The StorSimple appliance identifies and manages this working set locally on high speed Solid State Disks (SSDs) and automatically tiers the ”colder” data to cloud storage. Applications get local SSD performance with the elasticity of the cloud through automatic tiering based on a BlockRankTM algorithm that does for blocks of content what Page Rank does for Google. The appliance, in one box, delivers automatically tiered primary storage, cloud archival, cloud data protection and cloud disaster recovery.

DATA, STORAGE & CLOUD –THE BIG ENTERPRISE CHALLENGE