Cloverleaf Climbs Out

Israeli startup Cloverleaf Communications Inc. scrambled out of stealth mode today, as it prepares to launch a monster storage appliance toward the end of this month (see Cloverleaf Debuts '3D Storage').

The company, now headquartered in Southborough, Mass., was spun out of Israeli research and development company ELTA in May 2001, bringing with it storage technology developed for the Israeli defense industry.

Our visions was to take technology developed for the defense market and apply it to the commercial market,” says Cloverleaf CEO Avi Weiss, claiming that the company hit the ground running in 2001, with hundreds of thousands of man-hours already under its belt. Since then, he says, the company has continued to build on the intellectual property it inherited from ELTA with more specialized storage networking expertise, allowing it to offer so-called “3D consolidation” of heterogeneous storage networking services and resources.

By this, Cloverleaf basically means that it does everything under the sun for storage management and consolidation. The company’s name, which is also the name of its soon-to-be-released appliance, is meant to reflect the three dimensions of networked storage it claims to address: capacity management across heterogeneous storage environments; increasing bandwidth; and simplifying the delivery of storage services, like data protection, encryption, and disaster recovery, whether it's on a SAN, NAS, or a host.

“They have a platform that does a billion different things,” says Enterprise Storage Group Inc. analyst Steve Duplessie. “It literally does everything... It probably even has a kitchen sink, too... This thing can really allow people to do storage as a utility.”Duplessie says the company will face competition on a number of the different features it provides, but he hasn’t seen anybody even remotely close to offering the whole smorgasbord the company will be serving its customers. “It just does tons of cool stuff,” he says.

While the Cloverleaf technology may be top-notch, and could certainly be beneficial to the medium-sized and high-end enterprises it’s targeting, simply trying to explain what it does could prove to be a liability. “They have to figure out how to pare it down to go to market,” Duplessie says. “It really does so many things that it’s a burden to describe.”

No matter how many features and services Cloverleaf is prepared to offer, however, Weiss balks at any suggestion that it's a "God box."

“This is not a God box!” he says. “We’re not developing everything, and we’re not solving world hunger. It integrates into your existing network, and solves enterprise-level problems. We’re integrating it with third-party solutions.”

Notes Duplessie, "It is more of a God system. Maybe they’re offended by the 'box' term?"Cloverleaf, which has already received more than $15 million in funding from investors including ELTA, BancBoston Capital, and Genesis Partners, has developed its software in house, and has bundled it with a number of off-the-shelf hardware components into a 19-inch appliance that plugs into the network between the storage and the switches or host bus adapters.

Joseph Klein, co-founder and chief operating officer of Cloverleaf, claims that the box can plug into any existing storage environment. “On the network level, any servers see it as consolidated storage,” he says. “And all the storage sees it as a consolidated server farm.”

Duplessie believes Cloverleaf’s story is impressive. “You can put any storage on the planet behind it,” he says. “If you wanted to, you could even have a Clariion sitting next to NetApp boxes... From a virtualization perspective, they’re DataCore Software Corp. on steroids.”

The company, which has been beta testing the appliance with three different companies, wouldn’t reveal how much the wonder-box is going to cost. Klein, however, claims that it offers tremendous savings from day one. “It enables you to solve a lot of problems,” he says.

— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch