Before launching Dassana, CEO and co-founder Gaurav Kumar was involved in his fair share of startups. The most recent, before Dassana, was RedLock, a cloud security company that he sold to Palo Alto Networks for $173 million in 2018. He said that everywhere he went, he used logging software and almost invariably resulted in a large bill. , something that was set to change when Dassana launched.
Logging involves a large amount of data related to application performance, operations, and security. If you’re trying to cut costs around logging, usually. it means you’re getting less visibility into your systems. He said that his goal in starting Dassana was to reduce the cost of registration without corresponding data loss.
The way they are doing this is by changing the way log data is stored, which he says not only makes it cheaper, but also makes it easier to find and query that data.
“Currently, registries are extremely structured, which means they have very defined fields. So what we can do is store these logs in a columnar fashion, much like how the Big Data Hadoop ecosystem has evolved over the last 15 to 20 years, and that allows you to analyze large volumes of data,” he said.
“I would say that we are the only vendor that is bringing this structured columnar compression to logs for the first time.” If you’re wondering why existing log providers haven’t done this yet, he says it’s only because of recent advances in column compression that his company has been able to take advantage of, and legacy providers with older technology are at a disadvantage because to that .
Dassana is capable of separating storage and compute, which means you pay separately for storage compared to when you query the data. When combined with compression techniques, clients can reduce registration bills by as much as 10x-20x, she says.
Also, because the data is structured similar to a database, it allows customers to query the data using SQL, a language many IT people are familiar with.
It’s early days for the company, which is making the service generally available starting today. It has a dozen employees, but Kumar says the company is hiring aggressively and believes that, as a largely distributed company, it can create a more diverse team because it’s not confined to a geography like the Bay Area.
He also says the company isn’t necessarily looking for IT experience, and that allows it to find a broader pool of applicants, but admits that hiring is a struggle in general, and the more filters you apply, the more difficult it is. is.
Dell Technologies Capital directed the financing of the company with the help of various industry angels.