Friday, October 1, 2010

Making Fast Money


Cirtas Systems, a cloud storage hardware company, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing that it has raised a $10 million first round of funding.


The San Jose, Calif.-based company is announcing its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, a piece of storage equipment that sits in cloud-based data centers. Cirtas deploys Bluejet controllers in a customer’s data center.  Bluejet functions just like an on-site storage array, and our technology is seamlessly connecting to and accelerating the performance of off-site cloud storage services, with fast response to user queries, said Dan Decasper, chief executive.


The startup is attacking a common problem for enterprises. Storage systems are getting so complex that they require the architectural expertise of highly specialized people to solve. The amount of data in corporations is exploding so fast that it’s hard to keep up with storage growth needs. By shifting it to the cloud, or Web-based data centers that can be outside of a company’s physical premises, companies can offload the task to others and reduce costs.


The product is aimed at medium and large enterprises and is available now. By tapping the cloud, the company hopes to solve complex security, performance and compatibility issues that stop companies from using cloud storage. One of the big benefits is that enterprises will be able to move their storage from one cloud service firm to another to get better pricing.


Cirtas said it has completed beta tests at more than a dozen enterprise customers across diverse markets. The company ties together techniques for optimizing networks to work with its virtualized storage arrays so that it can deliver what it calls the world’s first cloud-enabled storage system. The company’s first purchase order has come from beta user Robert Half International.


Cirtas said it can securely encrypt all data in transit to and from the cloud, making sure that only authorized users have access to data. If there is a security breach, the Bluejet technology can prevent data from being read or used, as administrators can control who has access. It can also anticipate storage costs and how they fluctuate. And it can manage data for speedy performance.


Cirtas raised money from New Enterprise Associates; Lightspeed Venture Partners; and Amazon.com, itself a major player in cloud computing through its Amazon Web Services offering. The company plans to use the money to expand its infrastructure and accelerate the adoption of its technology.


Amazon is one of the big advocates of cloud computing, which can give businesses more options and better control over how they purchase data storage. Cirtas’s approach to the cloud is tightly aligned with Amazon’s, said Jeff Blackburn, senior vice president of corporate development at Amazon. He said Amazon was most impressed with the ability of Cirtas to migrate large quantities of data into the cloud in a fast, secure, and cost-effective manner.


Beyond Amazon, Cirtas has also secured a strategic alliance with Iron Mountain, which offers archive services. The Cirtas Bluejet product costs $69,995 per appliance. It is available from a variety of industry resellers. The company said it is making free evaluation systems available to customers.


The company was founded in 2008 by Decasper and Allen Samuels. Its team includes veterans of Citrix, DataDomain, NetApp and Riverbed. Cirtas has 30 employees. Rivals include storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, Twinstrata, Nasuni, StorSimple and Panzura.


[Pictured at top: Decasper (left) and Josh Goldstein, marketing chief]


Next Story: HP launches fancy touch-based desktops and an app store for touch apps Previous Story: Google beefs up Apps security to win cloud customers





A standard right wing talking point is that tax cuts for the rich and corporations create jobs.


This is, actually, true. They create jobs overseas.


The tax cuts’ two bills, in 2001 and 2003 – changed laws so that personal income tax rates were reduced, exemptions for the Alternative Minimum Tax increased, and dividend and capital gains taxes also cut.


Yet in the debate, it seems of no moment to either side whether the tax cuts were effective in achieving their goal of spurring business investment and making the US economy more competitive.


Our own examination of US non-residential investment indicates that the reduction in capital gains tax rates failed to spur US business investment and failed to improve US economic competitiveness.


The 2000s – that is, the period immediately following the Bush tax cuts – were the weakest decade in US postwar history for real non-residential capital investment.


Not only were the 2000s by far the weakest period, but the tax cuts did not even curtail the secular slowdown in the growth of business structures.


http://crooksandliars.com/ian-welsh/tax-cuts-rich-create-jobs-outside-us


The logic of this is simple enough. If you have money to invest, you're going to invest it where it'll return the most. Right now and in the past couple decades that is either in leveraged financial games, or it is in economies which are growing fast and have low costs. The US does not have high growth compared to China or Brazil or many other developing countries. It has high costs compared to those countries as well.


If you can build a factory overseas which produces the same goods for less, meaning more profit for you, why would you build it in the US?


Until that question is adequately answered, by which I mean "until it's worth investing in the US", most of the discretionary money of the rich will either go into useless speculative activities like the housing and credit bubbles, which don't create real growth in the US, or they will go overseas.


There are a number of ways this question can be answered.



  • You could slap taxes on foreign capital flows;

  • you could slap tariffs on foreign goods produced in low cost domiciles so that companies have to produce in the US to have access to the US market;

  • you could push industries which are hard to outsource but don't actually decrease American competitiveness. The housing bubble increased the cost of doing real business in the US by inflating real estate costs. A massive buildout making every building in the US energy neutral or an energy producer would increase US competitiveness.

  • you could try and do what America once did: have a tech boom. If the future is being produced in a country then everyone has to invest there and when things are changing fast you can't offshore production, because speed matters and offshoring is slow. This is why real wages increased during the tech boom of the 90s.


There are other answers as well, but the point is simpler: you must answer the question "why invest in the US instead of a low cost, high growth country?" Until you answer that question tax cuts will not only not do any good, but in a sense will do harm, by increasing the speed at which jobs are offshored out of America.




ScribbleLive plans to reinvent the <b>news</b> article | VentureBeat

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining VentureBeat in ...

The Morning <b>News</b> | Slog | The Stranger, Seattle&#39;s Only Newspaper

Slog, featuring Dan Savage, is Seattle's most popular News & Culture Blog. Seattle News, Politics, and Arts Blog. The Stranger covers local & national news, politics, restaurants, bars, music, movies and the arts.

<b>News</b> Corp. Donates $1 Million to U.S. Chamber of Commerce <b>...</b>

The donation is the News Corporation's second known contribution to a group that is advertising heavily to support Republicans this year.


eric seiger do eric seiger

Cirtas Systems, a cloud storage hardware company, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing that it has raised a $10 million first round of funding.


The San Jose, Calif.-based company is announcing its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, a piece of storage equipment that sits in cloud-based data centers. Cirtas deploys Bluejet controllers in a customer’s data center.  Bluejet functions just like an on-site storage array, and our technology is seamlessly connecting to and accelerating the performance of off-site cloud storage services, with fast response to user queries, said Dan Decasper, chief executive.


The startup is attacking a common problem for enterprises. Storage systems are getting so complex that they require the architectural expertise of highly specialized people to solve. The amount of data in corporations is exploding so fast that it’s hard to keep up with storage growth needs. By shifting it to the cloud, or Web-based data centers that can be outside of a company’s physical premises, companies can offload the task to others and reduce costs.


The product is aimed at medium and large enterprises and is available now. By tapping the cloud, the company hopes to solve complex security, performance and compatibility issues that stop companies from using cloud storage. One of the big benefits is that enterprises will be able to move their storage from one cloud service firm to another to get better pricing.


Cirtas said it has completed beta tests at more than a dozen enterprise customers across diverse markets. The company ties together techniques for optimizing networks to work with its virtualized storage arrays so that it can deliver what it calls the world’s first cloud-enabled storage system. The company’s first purchase order has come from beta user Robert Half International.


Cirtas said it can securely encrypt all data in transit to and from the cloud, making sure that only authorized users have access to data. If there is a security breach, the Bluejet technology can prevent data from being read or used, as administrators can control who has access. It can also anticipate storage costs and how they fluctuate. And it can manage data for speedy performance.


Cirtas raised money from New Enterprise Associates; Lightspeed Venture Partners; and Amazon.com, itself a major player in cloud computing through its Amazon Web Services offering. The company plans to use the money to expand its infrastructure and accelerate the adoption of its technology.


Amazon is one of the big advocates of cloud computing, which can give businesses more options and better control over how they purchase data storage. Cirtas’s approach to the cloud is tightly aligned with Amazon’s, said Jeff Blackburn, senior vice president of corporate development at Amazon. He said Amazon was most impressed with the ability of Cirtas to migrate large quantities of data into the cloud in a fast, secure, and cost-effective manner.


Beyond Amazon, Cirtas has also secured a strategic alliance with Iron Mountain, which offers archive services. The Cirtas Bluejet product costs $69,995 per appliance. It is available from a variety of industry resellers. The company said it is making free evaluation systems available to customers.


The company was founded in 2008 by Decasper and Allen Samuels. Its team includes veterans of Citrix, DataDomain, NetApp and Riverbed. Cirtas has 30 employees. Rivals include storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, Twinstrata, Nasuni, StorSimple and Panzura.


[Pictured at top: Decasper (left) and Josh Goldstein, marketing chief]


Next Story: HP launches fancy touch-based desktops and an app store for touch apps Previous Story: Google beefs up Apps security to win cloud customers





A standard right wing talking point is that tax cuts for the rich and corporations create jobs.


This is, actually, true. They create jobs overseas.


The tax cuts’ two bills, in 2001 and 2003 – changed laws so that personal income tax rates were reduced, exemptions for the Alternative Minimum Tax increased, and dividend and capital gains taxes also cut.


Yet in the debate, it seems of no moment to either side whether the tax cuts were effective in achieving their goal of spurring business investment and making the US economy more competitive.


Our own examination of US non-residential investment indicates that the reduction in capital gains tax rates failed to spur US business investment and failed to improve US economic competitiveness.


The 2000s – that is, the period immediately following the Bush tax cuts – were the weakest decade in US postwar history for real non-residential capital investment.


Not only were the 2000s by far the weakest period, but the tax cuts did not even curtail the secular slowdown in the growth of business structures.


http://crooksandliars.com/ian-welsh/tax-cuts-rich-create-jobs-outside-us


The logic of this is simple enough. If you have money to invest, you're going to invest it where it'll return the most. Right now and in the past couple decades that is either in leveraged financial games, or it is in economies which are growing fast and have low costs. The US does not have high growth compared to China or Brazil or many other developing countries. It has high costs compared to those countries as well.


If you can build a factory overseas which produces the same goods for less, meaning more profit for you, why would you build it in the US?


Until that question is adequately answered, by which I mean "until it's worth investing in the US", most of the discretionary money of the rich will either go into useless speculative activities like the housing and credit bubbles, which don't create real growth in the US, or they will go overseas.


There are a number of ways this question can be answered.



  • You could slap taxes on foreign capital flows;

  • you could slap tariffs on foreign goods produced in low cost domiciles so that companies have to produce in the US to have access to the US market;

  • you could push industries which are hard to outsource but don't actually decrease American competitiveness. The housing bubble increased the cost of doing real business in the US by inflating real estate costs. A massive buildout making every building in the US energy neutral or an energy producer would increase US competitiveness.

  • you could try and do what America once did: have a tech boom. If the future is being produced in a country then everyone has to invest there and when things are changing fast you can't offshore production, because speed matters and offshoring is slow. This is why real wages increased during the tech boom of the 90s.


There are other answers as well, but the point is simpler: you must answer the question "why invest in the US instead of a low cost, high growth country?" Until you answer that question tax cuts will not only not do any good, but in a sense will do harm, by increasing the speed at which jobs are offshored out of America.




ScribbleLive plans to reinvent the <b>news</b> article | VentureBeat

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining VentureBeat in ...

The Morning <b>News</b> | Slog | The Stranger, Seattle&#39;s Only Newspaper

Slog, featuring Dan Savage, is Seattle's most popular News & Culture Blog. Seattle News, Politics, and Arts Blog. The Stranger covers local & national news, politics, restaurants, bars, music, movies and the arts.

<b>News</b> Corp. Donates $1 Million to U.S. Chamber of Commerce <b>...</b>

The donation is the News Corporation's second known contribution to a group that is advertising heavily to support Republicans this year.


eric seiger dermatologist eric seiger dermatology


I Need Cash Now Teleseminar Series by bigmarketing





















































No comments:

Post a Comment