Last year while talking with Jason Seats, former VP of Engineering at Rackspace and more recently MD of TechStars Cloud, we started talking about existing data centers and what their needs were as they aim to compete with the large cloud players. Quickly we begun to postulate about what a company would look like that focused on giving data centers higher density for the data center operator, automatic detection and recovery in the event of outages, and end user self service to recover files and data. Coincidentally, at the same time Luke Marsden, founder and CEO of HybridCluster began talking to us both about his vision of the future of data centers. I quickly agreed with his vision and was excited to come on board as an early industry adviser and, later on, initial angel investor. HybridCluster is doing some really interesting work and ticks another one of my checkboxes, is focused not only on the high-profile US market, but also internationally (in fact the company is currently headquartered in the UK). HybridCluster is today announcing its fundraising round and the immediate availability of the latest release of its integrated suite of storage, replication and web clustering software. from the release: HybridCluster has triggered a rethink about cloud and hosting industry’s dependency on high cost, legacy virtualisation and storage stacks that fail to fully protect both businesses and end users. Computer scientists and industry experts have combined at HybridCluster to deliver breakthrough storage and hosting platform technology that automatically detects and recovers data centre outages in less than one minute, delivers 4x better density of customers per server, and offers end user to self-recover lost files and data. HybridCluster 2.0 provides service providers the ability to create cost effective, high availability hosting and email infrastructure. It provides:

  • High-Availability: Self-healing to automatically recover when hardware, software, networks or even an entire region fails – and in less than a minute from a backup made less than a minute ago.
  • Intelligent Auto-Scaling: Scaling to provide and charge for scalability in response to spikes in traffic.
  • Rapid Restore Data Vault: ‘Time machine’-like capability to allow hosting company customers to roll back to last good version of files themselves in case of accidental data loss or malicious attack for websites, databases and mailboxes.

Of course the proof of a product comes from customer success and here is where the case study of US web hosting business BrickStreet Data Systems comes in. CEP Andrew Skattebo says that:

We wanted to grow our hosting business but our old platform was vulnerable to systems failures, traffic spikes and end users deleting their own files. It was also exceedingly difficult to do even routine maintenance on each server. That’s why after months of research and testing and finding other solutions either too complex or too expensive, we chose and deployed HybridCluster. Today we can offer a more cost-effective, high-availability hosting platform that is easier to maintain and takes away many of the risks that normally affect a business like ours.

I’m really pleased for Luke and the team – everything seems to be really fitting into place – the product is excellent and is already seeing wins in customer sites globally. The funding is in place to fuel the development of the product and the team is being built out with some excellent hires. I’m really looking forward to watching HybridCluster in the months and years ahead.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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