Emerging Vendors 2013: Storage Vendors

Storage Superstars

Each year in our Emerging Vendors list, CRN looks at the tech startups making their presence known in the industry. Each company on the list also has an all-important quality: It has demonstrated that it understands the value of the channel. Here we look at the emerging players in the storage industry, those that are blazing a trail through innovative online backup services, NAS and SAN appliances, unique cloud storage platforms and much more.

Actifio

Waltham, Mass.
Top Executive: Ash Ashutosh, CEO



Actifio offers tools for managing "copy data," the exploding volumes of information copied by data protection, backup, disaster recovery, analytics, business continuity, test and development, and other systems. Actifio says its technology reduces licensing and hardware costs, cuts bandwidth usage, and shrinks the data storage footprint.

Amplidata

Milpitas, Calif.
Top Executive: Mike Wall, CEO



Amplidata develops the AmpliStor object-based storage technology to handle massive amounts of data, which the company said has the potential to store hundreds of petabytes of data at half the cost of RAID-based storage systems. The company's BitSpread erasure coding software is a key component of the system.

Astute Networks

San Diego
Top Executive: Bob MacKnight, CEO



Astute develops Flash-based storage appliances for physical and virtual environments the company said offer increased performance, enhanced user productivity and lower IT costs. The company's ViSX family of networked Flash appliances delivers a high number of sustained IOPs to dramatically increase application performance.

Avere Systems

Pittsburgh
Top Executive: Ron Bianchini, President & CEO



Avere builds high-performance network-attached storage systems that sit at the edge of customers' infrastructure and automatically tier customers' data, storing the most-accessed data on filers and less-active data on other NAS appliances. More than half of the company's sales go through the channel.

BridgeStor

Poway, Calif.
Top Executive: John Matze, CEO

BridgeStor develops appliances for deduplicating primary data and providing services for VMware virtual machine data. In June the company unveiled enhancements to its Crunch virtual deduplication appliance for Microsoft's System Center Data Protection Manager.

Ciphertex Data Security

Chatsworth, Calif.
Top Executive: Jerry Kaner, Founder & President

Ciphertex markets secure, portable data storage systems that incorporate advanced hardware encryption technology. The company said its direct-attached storage and network-attached storage systems provide high levels of performance, security and reliability for such markets as government and healthcare.

CloudAlly

London

CloudAlly provides automated daily backups of leading online services such as Google Apps, Salesforce, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Amazon SimpleDB, DynamoDB and others to unlimited Amazon S3 secure storage. The service, according to the company, eliminates manual intensive administrative processes

CloudByte

Campbell, Calif.
Top Executive: Greg Goelz, CEO

CloudByte develops software-defined storage technology, and its claim to fame is the quality of service guarantee it provides to every application from a shared storage platform. In June the company named former SanDisk executive Greg Goelz as CEO.

CTERA Networks

Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Liran Eshel, CEO

Ctera Networks' Cloud Storage Enablement Suite offers a cloud-based service delivery platform, on-premise cloud storage gateway appliances, and management features with a management dashboard. The company also launched mobile cloud apps for business users looking for secure access to files and data backups.

EVault

San Francisco
Top Executive: Terry Cunningham, President & General Manager

EVault backup solutions seamlessly integrate on-premise and online backup data protection for fast, local data access and ensured cloud disaster recovery. Optimized for distributed environments and backed by an ironclad cloud, EVault technology also powers the offerings of cloud services providers, data centers, telcos, ISVs, and many others. EVault is a Seagate Company.

Exablox

Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: Douglas Brockett, CEO

Data storage startup Exablox came out of stealth mode in April with the Exablox OneBlox storage appliance, a system that brings enterprise storage capabilities, including deduplication, failover, replication and self-diagnosis, to the SMB market in a package the company said is very attractive to solution providers.

GridIron Systems

Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: Som Sikdar, Founder & CTO

Violin Memory develops a new class of high-performance, flash-based storage systems that are designed to bring storage performance in-line with high-speed applications, servers and networks. The company was acquired by Violin Memory in Jan. 2013.

Gridstore

Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: George Symons, CEO

Gridstore replaces legacy storage architecture with scale-out-storage technology and lets businesses build grids made up of blocks added to a network. A low-cost storage device with its own CPU and memory resources allows businesses to add blocks as they grow.

HEROware

San Clemente, Calif.
Top Executive: Rob Ryan, President

HEROware markets a number of business continuity, secure backup and disaster recovery appliances, software and cloud services that help businesses meet HIPAA/HITECH requirements. Offerings include the Hero Defender appliance line, Secure-Suite applications and Secure Cloud.

Infrascale

El Segundo, Calif.
Top Executive: Ken Shaw, CEO

Infrascale is a storage platform-as-a-service company with a secure, scalable cloud storage platform that works in both private and public cloud environments. Infrascale's infrastructure solutions include raw cloud storage, backup as a service, archiving as a service, and file-server as a service.

Kaminario

Newton, Mass.
Top Executive: Dani Golan, CEO

Kaminario develops an all solid-state Flash SAN storage system, the Kaminario K2. It features a scale-out architecture that allows dynamic load balancing, automatic distribution of data across the system and high availability as capacity is increased.

Millenniata

Provo, Utah
Top Executive: Paul Brockbank, President & CEO

Millenniata develops what it calls "the standard in permanent data storage" technology with its M-DISC DVDs. The M-DISC, including the new 25-GB M-DISC Blu-ray and the standard 4.7-GB M-DISC, is constructed of inorganic rock-like materials, resistant to light, temperature and humidity. This combination allows information to be written once and read forever.

Nakivo

Campbell, Calif.
Top Executive: Bruce Talley, Co-Founder & CEO

Nakivo develops data protection products for VMware virtualized environments. The company's backup and replication software enables small businesses to protect, encrypt, compress and deduplicate data both onsite with local storage and offsite with public clouds such as Amazon Web Services.

Nasuni

Natick, Mass.
Top Executive: Andres Rodriguez, Founder & CEO

Nasuni serves distributed enterprises by combining on-premise hardware, cloud storage and an integrated service. Nasuni's Filer storage controller allows businesses to remotely control and manage easily accessible data volumes and provide shared data to multiple global locations.

NexGen Storage

Louisville, Colo.
Top Executive: John Spiers, CEO & Fusion-io SVP & General Manager

NexGen Storage develops hybrid storage appliances based on Fusion-io Memory for small to mid-size enterprises. The company was acquired by Fusion-io in April.

Nimble Storage

San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Surech Vasudevan, CEO

Nimble Storage develops flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions. In May the company unveiled the Nimble Storage SmartStack for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) leveraging Citrix XenDesktop running on Cisco Unified Computing System.

Pure Storage

Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Scott Dietzen, CEO

All-flash storage array developer Pure Storage in May unveiled the third-generation of its enterprise-class array, the FlashArray 400 Series. The FlashArray 400 uses the company's new Purity Operating Environment 3.0 software to double the storage capacity and performance over its previous models and to accelerate virtual machine cloning.

Savage IO

Batavia, N.Y.
Top Executive: Phillip Roberto, CEO

Savage IO markets data storage systems, including its DataBrick system, an alternative to legacy storage systems, which combines server, storage and network capabilities. Recently the company launched its Savi 360 remote monitoring software.

Scale Computing

Indianapolis
Top Executive: Jeff Ready, CEO

Scale Computing's HC3 system is an integrated server, storage and virtualization platform designed to help mid-size businesses develop private clouds. The product is highly scalable and makes complex IT infrastructure appear as a single server.

Skyera

San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Radoslav Danilak, Co-Founder & CEO

Skyera unveiled its first all-solid-state storage product last year. The company's all-flash storage arrays take advantage of low-cost, consumer-grade MLC flash storage technology to offer flash storage solutions at about $3 per GB, or less than $1 per GB with deduplication.

Starboard Storage Systems

Broomfield, Colo.
Top Executive: Bill Chambers, CEO

Starboard Storage Systems is a developer of hybrid storage arrays featuring SSDs and spinning hard drives. In March CRN reported that the company had ceased sales and marketing operations and was seeking a buyer.

Tarmin

Cambridge, Mass.
Top Executive: Shahbaz Ali, President & CEO

Tarmin's massively scalable GridBank technology helps organizations store, control and understand the value of data as a competitive business asset, no matter its size, location or cost by uniting application, information and storage tiers into a single, integrated data-centric management architecture.

Tegile Systems

Newark, Calif.
Top Executive: Rohit Kshetrapal, CEO

Tegile Systems markets its Zebi hybrid storage arrays, which feature deduplication of primary data for both high-performance primary applications and secondary backup storage. The Zebi arrays support both SAN and NAS storage with snapshot and replication technology for about $1 per GB of capacity. Tegile's arrays feature a mix of solid-state memory and high-capacity hard drives.

Tintri

Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Kieran Harty, Co-Founder & CEO

Tintri builds hybrid flash and disk storage appliances that handle hundreds of VMware virtual machines and their storage in a single device, which to a server looks like a direct-attached storage array. The appliances, according to the company, cut the cost of attaching storage to virtualized server environments.

WhipTail Technologies

Whippany, N.J.
Top Executive: Dan Crain, CEO

WhipTail Technologies was one of the first storage companies to begin shipping all flash-based storage arrays. Each of the company's product lines, the Accela single-chassis all-flash arrays and the Invicta enterprise-class arrays, feature 100 percent solid-state technology.

Zetta.net

Boston
Top Executive: Ali Jenab, CEO

Zetta.net provides enterprise cloud backup, disaster recovery and archiving services for SMBs and MSPs. Its flagship DataProtect cloud storage technology provides cloud-based backups, replication of data with WAN optimization, and cloud-based snapshots that can be rolled back to earlier versions of stored data.