Enterprise software startup Velostrata has introduced hybrid cloud software designed to decouple compute functions from storage for enterprises mid-sized and up.

The San Jose, California company also announced Wednesday morning that it wrapped up $14 million in Series A funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. CEO Issy Ben-Shaul says the funding round will be used for additional product development.

Velostrata claims the separation of compute from storage lets enterprises stream production workloads to and from a hybrid cloud within minutes by leaving the storage on-premises.

“Up until now, the common assumption has been that for infrastructure-type common production workloads, the storage and compute needed to be tightly coupled,” Ben-Shaul says. “We challenged that premise and essentially decoupled compute from storage without sacrificing performance.”

The decoupling removes some of the barriers that enterprise customers face with respect to using a hybrid cloud for production workloads, Ben-Shaul says.

It can also increase agility in responding to spikes in business demand and reduced costs for enterprises. Ben-Shaul says that large enterprises, which typically have thousands of VMs on hand in order to over-provision their data centers or infrastructures, can reduce costs by using only the VMs they actually need. Enterprises are also able to cut costs by not having to pay for 24/7 storage blocks in a cloud.

“They (enterprises) get the benefit of being able to move in our out of the cloud within minutes without being concerned about being locked in with a certain vendor” he says.

Velostrata started working on its product 16 months ago, and it’s currently in the second phase of beta testing with enterprise customers, with general availability expected later this year.

“We talked to a large number of customers along the way and we’ve been getting key feedback,” Ben-Shaul says. “One of the key problems was that while they virtually all want to leverage the public cloud in one way or another, in many cases they can’t do it because they cannot move the storage up into the cloud. You have compliance issues, security issues and regulatory issues. It takes a long time to move a large amount of storage to the cloud, and it requires new ways to manage the storage. So all in all, it’s been a big impediment for enterprises to leverage the cloud.”

In order to use Velostrata, Ben-Shaul says enterprise customers start with a one-time setup by first connecting to a virtual private cloud within a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

From there, moving a workload to the cloud becomes a matter of "a right-click on a VM from your management console as an infrastructure manager, and you just say ‘run in cloud’ and that’s it," Ben-Shaul says.

In order to aid enterprises in determining when a VM should move into the cloud, Velostrata enables the use of VM orchestration tools and provides an API that can be tied to alerts or rules. For example, a rule can be put in place that says once the infrastructure reached 85 percent of its utilization, the enterprise can start moving VMs to the cloud.

“The beauty of our solution is, you don’t have to talk to the storage people. You don’t have to worry about moving or migrating" VMs, Ben-Shaul says. “On top of that, we leverage all of the security standards and methods. For instance, we encrypt all of the traffic that goes between on-premises and the cloud on top of the VPN.”

Ben-Shaul says that Velostrata also using caching to mitigate performance issues or to optimize the performance of the VMs that are running in the cloud.