Gridstore going gangbusters

Gridstore, the Hyper-V-focused, hyper-converged, all-flash appliance startup, is growing gangbusters after coming out, so to speak, a year ago.

Its third 2015 quarter was 440 per cent higher than the third 2014 quarter, and, for the nine months ending September 30, 2015 it saw year-to-date growth of 428 per cent YoY. Cumulative quarterly bookings growth is 54 per cent quarter on quarter, starting with the first quarter of introduction and continuing over the past four quarters.

It's grown its installed base each quarter, with 25 per cent growth in the third 2015 quarter. And it claims to have won all competitive bids against Nutanix, the HCIA market leader.

One of these bids involved, Gridstore says, a healthcare service provider, which virtualized its SQL Server instances, upgraded to the latest enterprise version of SQL Server, and funded it all with the cost savings in SQL Server licenses. Gridstore beat out an all-flash array vendor here too.

Other customers include genomics analysis tester Affymetrix for VDI, which got itself a 94 per cent decrease in time to deploy new desktops. Gridstore was preferred to Dell and HP in this account.

Customers are spread across vertical markets. In the past quarter, 23 per cent of sales were in State/Local Government and Education, 22 per cent in Health and Life Sciences, and 17 per cent to Service Providers.

It's gained more than 60 resellers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Here's another hyper-converged system vendor charging into mainstream storage array vendor accounts and creaming them. That will please its chairman, Geoff Barrall, who recently joined Imation as its CTO when that firm bought his Connected Data startup.

Of course, this is from a base of Gridstore shipping nothing, so the numbers have got to be good for it to have any hope of making it. The Hyper-V focus seems to be paying off and clean slate wins against Nutanix augurr well for the future. ®