Capacity Planner Grabs More Cash

MonoSphere picked up $11 million in funding today, giving the startup more time to try and fill a hole left by storage resource management (SRM) applications. (See Monosphere Pockets $11M.)

A year ago MonoSphere morphed from a startup looking to attack the broad but slowly developing storage virtualization market to one with a laser focus on storage capacity planning. (See MonoSphere's Back in New 'Capacity'.) Capacity planning helps administrators determine how much storage they're using and forecast growth. Accurate forecasts help companies avoid buying too much or too little disk, and better utilize the storage they have.

Capacity planning is usually part of SRM or backup reporting applications, but MonoSphere CEO Ray Villeneuve says those larger applications have holes in their offerings.

"We decided to distance ourselves from first-generation SRM applications that were discovering and provisioning applications," he says. "We said, 'Let's zero in on the underutilization of the capital asset.'"

It's been slow going so far. Villeneuve says his company has less than 20 customers using the Storage Horizon capacity planning application it launched a year ago -- perhaps because in a perfect world, capacity management is a feature rather than a separate product."They've stayed true to trying to solve one storage management problem completely," Taneja Group analyst Brad O'Neill says of MonoSphere. "They've thought more deeply about capacity management and planning than anybody else has. The challenge for MonoSphere is getting people to use a standalone product to do it."

Apparently, not many people are effectively using SRM products to do it either. Although SRM vendors EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, Symantec, and others take a shot at it, MonoSphere owes its survival thus far to the fact that none of them seem to do it well.

Rob Stevenson, managing director of market research firm TheInfoPro, says interviews with more than 150 storage managers at Fortune 1000 firms reveal a low satisfaction rate for using SRM for capacity planning.

"Satisfaction among end users is pretty poor," Stevenson says. When asked how effectively their SRM application forecasts growth of SAN, NAS, and DAS, more than 80 percent of respondents answered "somewhat," "minimal," or "not at all." Capacity planning is especially rare for firms using more than one storage vendor.

"The No. 1 method in use is home grown," Stevenson says. "Most of them are using spreadsheets, or keeping it in their head, or they lick their thumb and stick it in the air. It's difficult to find a heterogeneous platform that can pull together a variety of forecasts in the organization. You have to understand what all the business units are doing to do effective capacity planning."That could leave an opening for MonoSphere, if it increases its name recognition or scores a partnership or two with larger vendors. Villeneuve says he's finding interest among storage and SRM vendors, but not for the reasons you'd think.

"There's been a good deal of interest from larger storage OEMs to provide cross-platform management," he says. "This lets them see the installed base of their competitors. They can see the whole infrastructure, not just their own little wedge. They see it as a chance to sell to parts of organization they dont have."

Villeneuve says the 30-employee startup will use part of the funding on product development. He says he expects updates next year with broader hardware support and more automation.

Intel Capital led the funding round, which brings MonoSphere's total to $41 million. Previous investors, ComVentures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch