Zimbra Executive Heads To Hot Storage Startup

Scott Dietzen, co-founder President and CTO of Zimbra, is headed to a hot stealth-mode startup, PURE Storage, a company started by John Colgrove, a veteran of storage industry and founding engineer at Veritas, a storage software company.

PURE Storage, according to industry sources, is said to be working on an SSD-drive-based network attached storage and has developed unique software to enhance the performance and dependability of these expensive storage systems.

According to SEC filings, PURE Storage seems to have raised about $25 million in funding, and Silicon Valley sources peg the valuation north of $50 million. It seems the initial funding for the company came from Sutter Hill Ventures, led by Mike Speiser, who was listed as director and an executive officer in the SEC filings.

Speiser is a big believer in the solid state future. The company was using the code name, Os76 Inc. until recently, and was started in 2009 in the offices of Sutter Hill Ventures.

The company has raised $18.4 million of the total $20 million it plans to raise in total as part of its Series B funding. The latest investors in the company include Aneel Bhusri of Graylock Ventures and Mark Leslie, the founding CEO of Veritas.

Dietzen is a good catch for the company, as he has a long history in the software business. He was CTO of BEA Systems, and he joined that company after helping built WebLogic, an app server startup. He was president and CTO of Zimbra, and later joined Yahoo, before helping sell Zimbra to VMware.

Earlier this year, Stacey wrote about the growing number of storage startups, which are all trying to tackle the growing problems of data deluge. Many of these companies are skewing toward using solid state storage and moving away from disks.