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MonoSphere's Back in New 'Capacity'

MonoSphere Inc., which failed with virtualization software the first time around, is back with a storage capacity planning application. (See MonoSphere Releases App.)

MonoSphere resurfaced this week with Storage Horizon, after learning hard lessons with the virtualization software it started shipping in 2002 but had trouble selling. (See MonoSphere Whirls Out and MonoSphere Feeds Funds Into R&D.) We learned that most users had a strong preference to buy that class of product from big players,” MonoSphere CEO Ray Villeneuve says.

By 2003, he shook the dust from his heels. MonoSphere picked up $11.25 million in funding in late 2003 to fund a makeover and hauled in another $6 million from its previous VCs in August 2005 to bring the total for the 25-person Redwood City, California startup to $30 million.

Villeneuve hired a new engineering team. They scrapped the original software that let users pool heterogeneous storage resources. Instead, the startup developed a capacity planning tool for customers who find storage resource management (SRM) and other tools inadequate to manage storage capacity.

Villeneuve says many storage administrators are still using spreadsheets to handle capacity planning. He says MonoSphere’s design goal was to bring capacity planning capabilities that exist for mainframes and network servers to open storage.

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