10 Storage Emerging Vendors You Need To Know About

Not Just Speeds And Feeds

In days gone by vendors of data storage systems would sell their products based on the capacity their technology could provide and how fast data could be entered and extracted from a system.

Today data is stored everywhere, in on-premise and cloud systems, in primary storage and data backup and archive systems, behind a firewall or in a public cloud system. IT faces the challenge of tracking, managing, securing and providing access to all that data. The focus of many of today's storage startups is providing the technology to do just that.

Here's a look at 10 emerging vendors in the storage arena that you should be aware of.

ClearSky Data

Boston, Mass.

Top Executive: CEO Ellen Rubin

Founded: 2014

ClearSky Data simplifies enterprise storage by providing a fully-managed, scalable and secure service to meet all of an enterprise's storage needs, from primary to backup to recovery. ClearSky offers customers a multi-tier, hybrid data-management system by storing data in various tiers depending on their needs.

Cohesity

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Mohit Aron

Founded: 2013

Cohesity delivers a hyper-converged secondary storage platform for consolidating backup, test and development, file services, and analytic data onto an infinitely scalable, intelligent data platform that spans both on-premise data centers and the cloud. With Cohesity, IT organizations can simplify their storage environments and attain greater visibility into their data assets.

Datera

Sunnyvale, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Marc Fleischmann

Founded: 2013

Datera brings hyper-scale operations and economics to private and public clouds. Datera's unique architecture understands application intent, learns infrastructure capabilities, and continuously optimizes the underlying storage composition. The result is a low-latency, high-performance, and high-density block storage solution that's economical.

Elastifile

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Amir Aharoni

Founded: 2013

Elastifile is pioneering the next generation of software-defined storage (SDS) technology. The company's flexible, hardware-agnostic SDS architecture intelligently optimizes storage performance and efficiency, eliminating the need for traditional, costly alternatives. Elastifile enables enterprise applications to cost-effectively and seamlessly scale, while providing the reliability and manageability that IT administrators require.

Hedvig

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Avinash Lakshman

Founded: 2012

Hedvig helps customers modernize their storage systems and accelerate enterprise adoption of private and hybrid clouds. The company's technology combines block, file, and object storage for bare metal, hypervisor and container environments. The software-defined system is built on a true distributed system that is built to keep pace with scale-out applications and today's business climate.

Infinidat

Waltham, Mass.

Top Executive: CEO Moshe Yanai

Founded: 2011

Infinidat provides enterprise storage systems to companies around the world and in numerous vertical markets, such as finance, telecommunications, healthcare, insurance, IT and cloud service providers. Infinidat is focused on solving the problems storage buyers face when they are forced to choose between cost, capacity, functionality, reliability and performance.

ioFabric

Toronto

Top Executive: CEO Steven Lamb

Founded: 2013

ioFABRIC developed a transformative software-defined system that solves the big problems of data storage today: cost, complexity, and performance. The patent-pending technology in the company's flagship Vicinity product simplifies and transforms the fundamental way SME's think about and store data. Vicinity's dashboard manages data across all networks ensuring service levels are met.

Qumulo

Seattle, Wash.

Top Executive: CEO Peter Godman

Founded: 2012

Qumulo is a pioneer in data-aware scale-out network attached storage (NAS), which enables enterprises to manage and store enormous numbers of digital assets by building real-time analytics directly into the file system itself. Qumulo's technology is designed to leverage the price/performance of commodity hardware coupled with the modern technologies of flash, virtualization and cloud.

Rubrik

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: Bipul Sinha

Founded: 2014

Rubrik provides a converged data management platform for complete data protection and rich data services, delivering automated backup, instant recovery, unlimited replication, and data archival at a global scale. Organizations rely on Rubrik to deliver instant data access for on- and off-site recovery.

SoftNAS

Houston

Top Executive: CEO/CTO Rick Braddy

Founded: 2012

SoftNAS, a leading provider of software-defined network attached storage (NAS) systems, protects mission-critical data for customers using any combination of public, private and hybrid clouds. SoftNAS works with any hardware, any data type, across any geography, and with any IT environment, including the most popular public, private, and hybrid cloud computing platforms.