Company Overview

Gridstore is the leading provider of software defined storage that turns simple storage building blocks into the world’s most powerful and affordable storage without limits. Gridstore brings the era of mainframe style monolithic storage and its disruptive forklift upgrades to an end. The Grid allows businesses to start small and pay as they grow to any size while growing more powerful with each additional block. Eliminate the frustrations of planning and forecasting for the unknown. No more headaches, no more disruption to your business. Now you can effortlessly give your organization the powerful storage it demands.

Board of Directors

Leadership with a track record of innovation

The leadership of Gridstore brings together expertise in scale out storage, highly available systems, distributed computing, cloud computing and the business experience of building technology businesses from idea to IPO. The team brings a proven track record of seeing and realizing innovative new technology markets.

George Symons, Chief Executive Officer

George Symons brings over 20 years of storage experience to Gridstore as a member of its board of directors and CEO. Mr. Symons previously served as Chief Strategy Officer at Nexsan, resulting in its acquisition by Imation. Prior to Nexsan he held executive roles in storage companies including Xiotech Corporation (COO), EvoStor (CEO), Yosemite Technologies (CEO), EMC (CTO for Information Management), and Legato (CTO, VP of Development and Product Management). He has also held senior roles at FullTime Software, Software Research, PROCASE Corporation, and Sun Microsystems. Mr. Symons has bachelor degrees in Computer Science and Management Science from UCSD, and an MBA from UCLA.

Kelly Murphy, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer

Murphy is a serial entrepreneur with a track record of spotting and developing emerging technology markets. In 1998, Murphy founded Marrakech, the first on-demand software company that offered on-demand procurement and supply chain systems to some of the world’s largest retailers, consumer food producers, packaging companies and utilities – as well as the thousands of trading partners they collaborated with.

Geoff Barrall, Chairman

Geoff Barrall has brought his tremendous insight and storage industry experience to the Gridstore board. Geoff currently serves as CEO and Founder of Connected Data. Previous to this he was CEO of Drobo, a company he founded in 2005. Geoff has founded five companies including BlueArc Corporation, a supplier of enterprise Network Attached Storage (recently acquired by Hitachi), as well as several IT and consulting services firms. With more than a dozen storage-related patents to his credit, Geoff brings rich technology expertise and deep hands-on executive-level operational experience to Gridstore. In addition to his roles at Drobo and BlueArc, he serves on the board of directors for Nevex, Nexsan and Tacit Networks and was an executive consultant to the senior team at Brocade Communications. His storage experience also includes sitting on the boards of advisors for Data Domain and Nasuni amongst others.

Dr. Chris Horn, Director

Prior to co-founding IONA Technologies, Dr. Horn was a faculty member of the Computer Science Department of Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland) until 1991 when he co-founded and became CEO and Chairman of IONA. In 1991, IONA pioneered the emerging area of distributed computing and played a lead role in the development of the distributed computing standards known as CORBA. Without any venture capital, IONA went on to become the 5th largest IPO in the history of the NASDAQ in 1997. During this period, IONA was one of the largest top ten software companies by revenue in the world. IONA customers included the largest telco, financial and manufacturing companies in the world and its products continue to form the backbone of many of their high performance, mission critical systems. In June 2008, IONA was acquired by Progress Software NASDAQ (PRGS).

Glenn Solomon, GGV Capital

Since joining GGV Capital as a Partner in 2006, Glenn has led GGV’s investments in Pandora (NYSE: P), Successfactors (NYSE: SFSF/Acq by SAP), Isilon (NASDAQ: ISLN/Acq by EMC), Quinstreet (NASDAQ: QNST), Square, Conviva, Nimble Storage and Zendesk, helping the first four successfully navigate the initial public offering process. He is also actively involved with GGV’s investments in Appirio, BlueKai, Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce.com) and China Talent Group (CTG). Glenn focuses on enterprise software-as-a-service (Saas), cloud infrastructure and mobile.

Prior to GGV, Glenn was a General Partner with Partech International, where he led successful investments in Broadbase Software (acquired by Kana), Datacenter Technologies (acquired by Veritas/Symantec), Digital Island (acquired by Cable & Wireless), Pentasafe (acquired by NetIQ) and Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN). Earlier in his career, Glenn worked with Goldman Sachs and also with SPO Partners, a San Francisco-based private investment partnership. Glenn graduated from Stanford University, where he started on three NCAA championship tennis teams, and also earned an M.B.A from Stanford where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. He co-founded and remains active with The Spotlight Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to funding social entrepreneurs focused on education. Check out Glenn’s blog where he discusses the intersection of technology and finance, follow @GlennSolomon, or check out his profile LinkedIn.

Shomit Ghose, Onset Ventures

Shomit Ghose joined ONSET Ventures in 2001 after 19 years of working at high-tech companies in the Silicon Valley. During his career he participated in several successful IPOs, including those of Sun Microsystems and Broadvision. Prior to joining ONSET, he was Sr. VP of Operations at Tumbleweed Communications, where he managed the marketing, professional services, applications engineering and corporate development departments. He helped the company through a successful IPO in 1999. Previously, he was VP of the Worldwide Professional Services Organization at BroadVision and helped that company through a successful IPO in 1996.

His first job was as network protocol engineer at Metaphor Computer Systems, a company acquired by IBM. Later, he was an engineer in the original pre-IPO software development team at Sun Microsystems. He has also been Director of Marketing and then Director of Asia/Pacific Operations for nCUBE, a manufacturer of video-on-demand servers, and a board member of Alier, a data integration software company that is now part of webMethods.

Shomit was awarded two academic scholarships to the University of California, Berkeley, at age 15. He graduated in 1982 with a degree in Computer Science.

Investors