The release of VeloBit HyperCache v1.1 is a major milestone and celebration for VeloBit and our customers, partners and investors. I’m pleased with the response we’ve received, and especially proud of our team. I like to pause and reflect at major milestones. This blog shares my reflections on the last year and a preview of what you can expect from VeloBit in the next year.

Looking Back

Nine months ago I wrote a blog on why I joined VeloBit, outlining our market opportunity and why I thought VeloBit would be successful. I couldn’t be happier with how things have played out since then. Back in August, we predicted the emergence of SSD Caching Software as an important category (though no one called it “SSD Caching Software”, since our category was unnamed). Customers told us that the cost of SSD and complexity of existing SSD deployment models were constraining adoption in the enterprise. We expected that solutions to these two problems would get a strong market reception.  

VeloBit’s plan was to leverage our patent-pending inventions (content locality caching, line-speed data compression, horizontal architecture, etc.) to build a caching solution that would deliver large advantages in performance, cost, and ease of deployment. We set out to build a plug & play solution that could be deployed in 10 minutes, and that would sit invisibly between an application and its primary storage – allowing customers to gain the benefits of SSD while preserving their existing storage systems and processes.  

In addition to product innovation, we set out to introduce a low-cost, download-driven distribution model to the storage market - and pass our sales & marketing cost savings on to our customers and partners.

VeloBit Today

Our market has emerged much faster than any of us could have dreamed. The feedback we got from our early customer conversations has been verified and amplified. The enterprise SSD market craves lower costs and easier deployment, and SSD caching is the best path to achieve these. EMC’s introduction of VFCache validates the importance of SSD Caching (and gives VeloBit an easy comparison for our performance, cost and ease of use). Most of the storage analysts cover SSD Caching Software, and Wall Street analysts include “SSD Caching” in their research reports. 

Through some combination of luck and foresight VeloBit has caught a huge wave. SSD caching software is emerging rapidly, and VeloBit is a leader.  

It’s not enough to pick a good market. A company needs to execute, and I couldn’t be prouder of team VeloBit. Prakash Manden (VP Engineering) and Qing Yang (CTO) and the engineering team they lead have done a terrific job delivering exceptionally innovative products. VeloBit is the world’s fastest, most cost-effective, and easiest to install SSD cache. Later this week we’ll publish 3^rd party benchmarks that will blow people away! Our list of inventions is long and growing – with innovations in content locality caching, line-speed data compression, sequential scan filtering, inter-server cache coherence, and others. We recently received our first issued patent, and have another half dozen patents filed. VeloBit has the technical lead, and our lead is growing. Significantly, our engineering team has crushed our “ease of installation” goals. We targeted a 10-minute installation. VeloBit v1.1 installs in 60 seconds!  

Customers such as Masergy, Zoom Info, and DataFeedFile.com are seeing the benefits of VeloBit, speeding queries up to 20x (Masergy), boosting application throughput by 4x (Zoom Info), and cutting power and costs. They’re achieving these results without spending on high-end PCIe drives. VeloBit today drives strong acceleration at low cost for a broad set of applications including database/data warehouse (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, PosgreSQL, Cassandara), virtualized environments, financial analysis and simulation, enterprise search, e-commerce, web applications, and Hadoop. The list of applications is long and growing. Of particular note is our addition this month of a fast and inexpensive solution for VMware acceleration.

In the last 9 months, we have built a marketing and sales organization as well. Peter Velikin joined as head of marketing in September and has put VeloBit on the map. Our collection of blogs, white papers, deployment guides and webinars has become a must-read resource for customers planning their SSD deployments. Nearly 10,000 visitors came to VeloBit.com in April to peruse our content, generating over 200 leads. Both numbers are growing rapidly.

In March, Mike LaPeters joined as VP Sales to help drive our low-cost sales model. Through the combined efforts of Mike and Peter, together with a plug & play product that is drop-dead easy to install, VeloBit’s download driven sales model is taking off. Today we have 35 installations across 5 continents and are adding new installations at a rapid clip.  

There have been positive surprises in our distribution model as well. We have received much more inbound interest from value added resellers and OEM’s than we could have expected. In response, we’ve introduced a reseller program. We’ll have a double-digit number of VeloBit-certified VARs, across the globe, by the end of the month. Watch for OEM announcements soon as well.

Looking Forward

Over the last 9 months, we’ve identified additional customer needs. The first is a strong desire for hardware-agnostic SSD caching software. Customers hope to avoid vendor lock-in with the caching software. Great news for VeloBit! With the acquisition of our primary competitors, VeloBit now stands as one of the only hardware-neutral solutions in the market.

Additionally, we have seen strong demand for VeloBit on all major OS platforms. We raised more capital in February to speed development – and have added VeloBit for VMware, Windows, and Hyper-V to our release schedule. We will support all these major platforms by June.  

Finally, as enterprise SSD makes its way into important applications, customers have started to ask for hardened write-caching solutions that provide higher-availability and support clustered environments. Watch for some announcements from us later this year on this front.  Qing and the team have yet more clever innovations coming down the pipe.

VeloBit is growing rapidly. We move to our new offices in Lincoln later this month to accommodate all the great new people we are adding to the team.

On a final note, I’d like you all to know that VeloBit is hiring. Please visit www.velobit.com/careers for opportunities to help us drive our rapid growth.

May all your applications run faster and cheaper,

Duncan McCallum

CEO & Cofounder, VeloBit