You probably heard the news yesterday about CopperEgg in either the Statesman, InfoWorld, or ReadWriteWeb. Today we have a Q&A with company co-founder and CEO Scott Johnson.
Give us the elevator pitch for CopperEgg. In a nutshell, what does the company do?
CopperEgg gets deep inside your storage network, file servers and cloud instances to ensure everything runs smoothly. We deliver SaaS-based applications that provide true real-time analytics and performance monitoring into the health and performance of the infrastructure businesses use deploy applications and services. This includes physical datacenter components, as well as private and public clouds. Our solutions require zero-configuration and install in seconds-to-minutes, providing fine-grained visibility at an affordable price.
Our first product RevealStorage, introduced earlier this year is the first networked-storage monitoring solution that presents a clear, high-resolution picture of the performance dynamics of all storage appliances in the datacenter simultaneously. We have customers with storage clients numbering from 20 to 1500 units that use RevealStorage to detect and resolve storage bottlenecks that can affect application performance. A significant percentage of these customers use RevealStorage to monitor NFS (Network File System) data stores for VMware.
Yesterday we announced the availability of our second product, RevealCloud, that provides real-time analytics and visibility into a wide array of operating, status and performance metrics related to cloud instances and their associated shared storage resources. This service supports applications and service deployments in public and private clouds.
What makes CopperEgg’s solutions unique?
Delivering datacenter monitoring as a subscription-based service represents an exciting and dramatic departure from legacy monitoring approaches, and brings along several benefits. These include no up-front capital expense to purchase equipment, no up-front licensing-fee, no ongoing-maintenance of the equipment deployed to run the monitoring software, a renewable monthly subscription, and frankly a price-point well below any comparable solution.
Our solutions are based on the combination of high-frequency data sampling, the extreme performance and scalability of a NoSQL, schema-free database, and a highly interactive web-based User Interface, with click-through analytics. They are purpose-built to provide split-second insight into an unprecedented number of metrics from a large number of instances, enabling near-instantaneous decision-support.
Above all else, our services are intended to deliver ongoing value to our customers. That is the fundamental requirement of any subscription-based service, and the new minimum requirement for any product or service that aims to compete in today’s “real-time economy”. With the opportunities and pressures surrounding the growth of Big Data, companies don’t have time to stand around and wonder how their applications and services are performing. We’ve architected our solutions to provide immediate, actionable value that helps organizations optimize IT performance so they can seize new business opportunities.
Congratulations on the funding. It’s a process that many Austin startups are going through right now. Tell us about your backers, and the process?
As you know, we just announced $2 million in Series A funding, led by Silverton Partners. I’m sure your readers are well-aware of Silverton’s history of successful investments, and their willingness to invest in early-stage start-ups. Our Series A funding includes the appointments of Kip McClanahan and Morgan Flager to CopperEgg’s board of directors. Kip has been advising, guiding and encouraging us since Eric Anderson, CopperEgg co-founder and COO, and I first met with him to chat about our idea more than a year ago. Our initial funding from Silverton was a seed round. From that point on we have been forming hypotheses, listening to customers, building products, listening more, and driving our decisions based on data.
How did you come up with the idea for the product?
Eric and I were working with network attached storage (NAS) when we first met and realized that there were no tools available that provided real-time, cross-vendor performance analytics. Upon further investigation, we realized that vendor-agnostic NAS performance monitoring has been an underserved market for years. Even today, despite the fact that NAS is the fastest growing networked-storage market segment, RevealStorage is the only NAS-performance monitoring solution that provides real-time monitoring and detailed visibility into all NAS file server in the datacenter, simultaneously, without regard to vendor. This enables us to provide a very affordable means of monitoring NAS solutions such as FreeNAS and Openfiler, open source-based appliances that provide robust, feature-rich appliances that represent a less expensive alternative to proprietary, ‘closed’ storage solutions.
Was there an “a ha” moment, when you guys knew that you had something good?
During the development and deployment of our first product RevealStorage, our team realized that the lack of visibility into the real-time detailed performance metrics of our cloud instances at Amazon was causing our development effort to fall behind. Given our agile mindset and processes, this became an obstacle that we had to overcome.
Our team spent a couple of weeks searching for, and trying-out products and services aimed at solving this visibility problem. In the end, there were none that met our requirements. This was the “a ha” that led us to realize that every DevOps and IT organization in the world deploying into the public cloud was facing the same limitation. We began building RevealCloud out of necessity, for our own internal use. Now after several months of productizing, polishing and beta testing, we are releasing RevealCloud.
What can we expect to see from CopperEgg in the future?
CopperEgg will continue to innovate and provide value for IT systems management, in the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and datacenter, in any combination. Our mission is to continue to build on our high-performance analytics platform, and deliver the services necessary to optimize virtual and physical environments, but have never before been possible using legacy IT monitoring tools. Leveraging the low-cost, and extreme scalability of the public cloud today enables us to deliver these services at a price affordable by small data shops as well as large enterprises.