Pooling client storage sets this system apart

What: Symform, based in Seattle

Who: Praerit Garg, president and co-founder, 38

Mission: Delivers low-cost data storage for small and midsized businesses through a unique system that pools clients' storage resources instead of employing a costly data center.

Employees: 8

Financials: The privately held company has been offering its services since October and has, according to Symform, already signed up "thousands" of clients.

Microsoft seeds: As with many regional tech companies, Symform was launched by former Microsoft professionals. Garg and his partner, Bassam Tabbara, found they shared an urge to go out on their own. "It just became like Groundhog Day," Garg said. "We were doing the same thing every single day. Just by the nature of a big company, you're forced to being in a specialized role." So the two decided to find a niche of their own.

Symbiotically formed: Symform refers to "symbiotically formed," Garg said. That's because the company offers inexpensive online storage by pooling the local storage of their clients as a distributed data center. When clients sign on, they allow Symform to use a certain amount of their own storage to house data of other Symform clients.

Symform takes client data, chops it up into many little pieces, encrypts it and distributes copies of each block across the Internet to its pool of client storage.

Technological challenge: The toughest hurdle, said Garg, was the Internet itself. "It took us about 18 months to devise the technology," Garg said.

"The Internet is a strange beast. You don't know what firewalls people using, what kinds of bandwidth they have. So you can't duplicate the Internet in a lab."

— Patrick Marshall