Data Storage Startups: Innovation Unbound
The storage industry is continually changing. In fact, that change is so fast that new SSDs or all-flash storage arrays no longer turn heads like they did even a year ago, and bringing storage to the cloud is just as likely to elicit a yawn as it is a hurrah. Instead, storage news is more likely to come from better ways to migrate data seamlessly to and from and between on-premises and multi-cloud infrastructures, or in protecting, archiving, and managing storage in a seamless, consistent manner wherever it is stored. And throw in automation and orchestration to make all that happen.
It is with this in mind that CRN has built this list of hot storage startups for 2020 that are tackling a multitude of issues around data, from basic hardware components to the most sophisticated cloud capabilities.
Turn the page for a look at 10 independent startup storage developers that only recently either came out of stealth or introduced their first products.
Get more of CRN’s 2020 tech year in review.
Afi
CEO and Chief Product Officer: Vincent Marino
Afi develops intelligent data protection technologies for SaaS environments, including native support for cloud infrastructure data sources such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The company enables full-fidelity data protection and security for G Suite and Office 365, and claims to be the only vendor to preserve file document IDs, sharing rights and permissions, and to offer full-text search to assist with data recovery.
Catalog
CEO and Co-Founder: Hyunjun Park
Catalog, a Boston-based startup focused on developing technology to store archival data using synthetic DNA, in September unveiled a new $10 million Series A funding round to help continue development of its technology. Catalog has already demonstrated a prototype of its technology showcasing the ability to write the entire English language version of Wikipedia, which amounted to about 16 GBs of data, onto a tube about 1.5 inches long and 0.25 inches wide. Catalog‘s technology relies on a device that feeds blank webbing at 16 meters per minute into a modified inkjet printer that deposits drops of synthetic DNA on the web. That webbing is then moved to an incubation chamber to represent the data, which is then written to a flask of DNA.
Reading the data can be done with a DNA sequencer, he said.
Fungible
CEO and Co-Founder: Pradeep Sindhu
Fungible, based in Santa Clara, Calif., is the developer of the Fungible Storage Cluster, a scale-out all-flash, NVMe-over-Fabrics disaggregated storage platform. That platform is based on the Fungible DPU, or Data Processing Unit, which integrates processors for off-loading storage functionalities, a fast network-on-chip networking accelerator, and a storage stack that includes high-performance, in-line erasure coding, text and image compression, and data encryption to handle such storage services as raw block, durable block and key-value store for NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF).
InCountry
CEO and Founder: Peter Yared
InCountry develops what it calls data residence-as-a-service to let businesses run best-of-breed SaaS applications with data residency in over 90 countries. The San Francisco-based company‘s technology allows profile data to be stored in country of origin or citizenship with end-to-end compliance and audit support with data residency for profile regulation in over 90 countries with encryption in both single-tenant and multi-tenant environments. The company raised an $18-million round of funding in September with Accenture as one of its investors, with plans to accelerate its global expansion to help clients meet the growing number of country-specific and regional data residency regulations.
JetStream Software
CEO and Co-Founder: Tom Critser
JetStream Software was founded as FlashSoft Software before being acquired by SanDisk and then Western Digital, which then spun it out as a separate company to focus on building disaster recovery and workload migration technology for cloud service providers and enterprise clouds. The San Jose, Calif.-based company‘s software is integrated with VMware vSphere through standard VMware APIs and managed through vCenter and vSphere SPBM, and is compatible with any underlying storage infrastructure. JetStream Migrate software provides efficient cloud migration with no interruption to runtime operations, while JetStream DR provides enterprise-grade disaster recovery, business continuity, and continuous data protection as a cloud-based service.
Lightbits Labs
CEO and Co-Founder: Eran Kirzner
Lightbits Labs develops software-defined storage technology for developing target-side NVMe/TCP clustered storage solutions on any commodity server. The San Jose, Calif.-based company‘s technology allows for composable storage to help simplify deployment and provides for high-performance disaggregation of storage from the compute. The software includes advanced flash management technology to extend SSD lifetime along with persistent storage for container load-balancing. Intel in September invested an unspecified amount in Lightbits Labs and the two companies are now collaborating on developing disaggregated storage solutions.
MemVerge
CEO: Charles Fan
MemVerge, based in San Jose, Calif., was founded shortly after Intel released its first Optane SSDs to develop a new software stack to take advantage of the new storage technology. MemVerge‘s Big Memory Software, which went into general availability in September, works with the Optane persistent memory to scale memory out to petabytes in order to separate applications requiring the highest performance from traditional data storage. That provides fast data services including snapshot, replication, and data recovery and eliminate the performance penalty of memory swapping.
Nebulon
CEO: Siamak Nazari
Nebulon emerged from stealth in June with the introduction of Cloud-Defined Storage, the Fremont, Calif.-based company’s on-premises, server-based storage for mission critical applications managed by the Nebulon cloud. Cloud-Defined Storage features a combination of a cloud-based control plane and PCIe cards in customers’ servers as a way to provide enterprise-class data services for critical applications. Nebulon says Cloud-Defined Storage lets customers address both modern workloads like containers and NoSQL databases as well as traditional workloads like VMware and clustered SQL databases.
NVISNx
CEO: Glen Day
NVISNx helps businesses visually profile their data so they can better protect their most valuable digital assets and dispose of data that may be toxic or has no value. The Playa Vista, Calif.-based company‘s technology can ingest data from a wide range of data repositories and applications to extract data via its visual analytics engine that provides meaningful and actionable intelligence to business, privacy, and security professionals looking to make informed decisions on what data to protect and what data to delete.
StorageOS
CEO, CTO, and Founder: Alex Chircop
StorageOS develops cloud-native storage technology to provide persistent container storage for clients‘ stateful applications in production. The London-based company’s software-defined StorageOS technology delivers rapid failover, replication, in-memory cache, data reduction with access controls, and a rules engine. When deployed anywhere in a single container, StorageOS dynamically provisions highly available persistent volumes. StorageOS is targeted at developers, infrastructure managers, and platform architects. The company in September unveiled the release of StorageOS V2.2 Performance through Red Hat Marketplace.
