The 10 Coolest Storage Startups Of 2017

Storage Startups: New Blood Continues To Make Its Mark

Even as the storage industry consolidates via existing companies either getting acquired or otherwise closing their doors, waiting in the wings are several new small companies looking to take their place.

These new companies have a new way to address the burgeoning issues of managing ever-growing amounts of data, or a new take on existing technologies. And they come to market with the potential to change how the world stores data.

Here are 10 independent storage developers that either came out of stealth or introduced their first offering in the last 12 months.

Get more of CRN's 2017 tech year in review.

Excelero

CEO: Lior Gal

Software-defined storage technology startup Excelero in March came out of stealth with the introduction of its NVMesh Server SAN software. The company designed the software to pool NVMe storage from multiple servers as a high-performance base for serving mission-critical applications to enterprises but with the kind of block storage performance used by hyper-scale public cloud providers. Israel-based Excelero has $17.5 million in funding so far.

Leonovus

Chairman: Michael Gaffney

Leonovus develops software-defined object storage technology for enterprise on-premises, hybrid or public cloud users that addresses governance, risk management and compliance requirements. The software is designed to run on existing storage hardware. The Ottawa, Ontario-based company in March closed a round of funding that brought it $1.3 million for expanding production and sales capabilities.

Minio

CEO: Anand Babu Periasamy

Minio, the power behind the Minio open-source object storage server with an Amazon S3 compatible API, develops software for cloud-native and containerized applications to manage unstructured data growth. It allows an Amazon S3 compatible object storage server to be deployed in few seconds. The company in September closed a $20 million Series A funding round.

Nyriad

CEO: Matthew Simmons

Nyriad develops advanced storage technology for big data and high-performance computing. The first commercial spin-out from the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project, it was designed to capture about 160 TBps of radio data which required melding parallel computing and distributed storage processing. The technology is available to OEMs and cloud providers.

ScaleFlux

CEO: Hao Zhong

ScaleFlux recently entered the market with its Computational Storage Subsystem, or CSS, technology targeting high-performance, scaling, and agile compute-intensive and storage I/O-intensive applications like big data, database, data warehousing, and IoT. CSS is available as either a PCIe card or a U.2 drive form factor, and integrates heavy-duty compute engines with terabytes of flash storage.

StorageOS

CEO: Chris Brandon

StorageOS develops persistent stateful containerized storage for Docker Swarm or Kubernetes containers. A StorageOS cluster is created by deploying the StorageOS volume plug-in or container on each node to aggregate available server storage into a distributed pool and presents virtual block devices to clients. The company this year received $2 million in seed funding.

Storj Labs

Chief Strategy Officer: Shawn Wilkinson

Storj, pronounced "storage," is a developer of the Storj open-source decentralized cloud storage platform. The Storj utilizes spare storage capacity of its community members to store data that has been shredded and encrypted. The Atlanta-based company is unusual in that it uses its own cryptocurrency, the STORJ, because other forms of currency are not granular enough to be used for micropayments needed to pay for shared capacity.

Vexata

CEO: Zahid Hussain

Vexata this year released its first product, the VX-100 Scalable Storage System, based on its VX-OS software. The system presents a block or unstructured data I/O interface to enable applications to access and update large volumes of data at high throughput and low latency, and can be deployed as a fully contained or cloud-scale offering.

Wasabi

CEO: David Friend

Cloud storage startup Wasabi Technologies in May came out of stealth mode with a promise to store customers' data in its cloud six times faster than can be done with Amazon S3 while charging only $0.0039 per gigabyte per month. The Boston-based company, which has raised $8.5 million in funding, provides an open service that is 100 percent compatible with the Amazon S3 API.

WekaIO

CEO: Liran Zvibel

WekaIO develops WekaIO Matrix, a cloud-native scalable file system the company said provides all-flash storage performance with NAS simplicity. WekaIO Matrix provides fine-grained, dynamic scaling of resources based on application requirements. It is a distributed global namespace file system that scales to thousands of compute nodes and petabytes of storage, and provides integrated tiering to the cloud.