Emerging Vendors 2017: Storage Startups You Need To Know
Storage Startups, Smarter Storage
In the days when storage systems resided within the data center, the only real attributes that mattered were system capacity, input/output capabilities and cost.
Storing data is much more complicated today with data being stored in on-premise and cloud systems; in primary storage, archival storage, and backup and recovery systems; and in private, public and hybrid cloud systems. The challenge for IT today is tracking, managing, securing and providing access to all that data.
Oh, and the volumes of data continue to grow exponentially, by the way.
The focus of storage technology startups today isn't just on providing ways to store more data (although that's still part of it), but also on providing smarter ways to store data.
Here's a look at 30 emerging vendors in the storage arena that the channel should be aware of.
Archive360
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Robert DeSteno, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=170
Archive360 delivers data migration, storage and management systems for the Microsoft cloud. Archive360 has securely migrated tens-of-petabytes into the Microsoft cloud at high speeds with verifiable data-fidelity and legally defensible chain-of-custody. Archive360's Archive2Azure system is a leading compliance and unstructured data storage and management solution for the Microsoft Azure platform.
Cirrus Data Solutions
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Wayne Lam, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=171
Cirrus Data Solutions is a privately held developer of enterprise-class technology solutions for automated data management and optimization. The company develops market-leading solutions such as the Data Migration Server and Data Caching Server—each of which installs within minutes for fast, simple, uninterrupted data management with zero downtime.
ClearSky Data
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Ellen Rubin, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=172
ClearSky Data delivers on-demand primary storage with offsite backup and data recovery as a single service. ClearSky's hybrid cloud storage service brings together the performance and security of on-premises storage with the elasticity and economics of the cloud.
CloudEndure
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Ofer Gadish, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=173
CloudEndure transforms live workload mobility, enabling businesses to replicate, migrate and recover machines, along with their storage and applications, to and across cloud systems without downtime or data loss. By leveraging the cloud, CloudEndure eliminates the need for duplicate provisioning of resources and provides customers with cost-effective, enterprise-grade disaster recovery.
Cloudian Inc.
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Michael Tso, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=174
Cloudian turns information into insight with an infinitely scalable storage platform that consolidates, manages and protects enterprise data. Cloudian Enterprise Object Storage brings cloud technology and economics to the data center with data durability, intuitive management tools and an AWS S3 API.
Cloudistics
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Najaf Husain, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=175
Cloudistics is an enterprise hybrid cloud system developer computing whose software-defined technology converges storage, compute, networking, virtualization and management into a single platform. The vendor's elastic all-flash storage block, driven by the company's storage virtualization software, simplifies storage management and delivers throughput of 4GBps and 200,000 IOPs.
Cohesity
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Mohit Aron, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=176
Cohesity consolidates inefficient secondary storage silos into a hyper-converged, web-scale data platform for enterprises, which seamlessly spans on-premise data centers, public clouds and remote offices. With Cohesity, customers can efficiently manage their growing secondary data, which typically comprises 80 percent of their total data assets, at a fraction of current costs.
Datera
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Marc Fleischmann, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=177
Datera exited stealth mode in 2016 with intelligent data infrastructure technology that provides elastic block storage for private cloud infrastructures. The company's software works across any x86 server or can be purchased as part of a complete all-flash or hybrid-flash appliance.
Datos IO
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Tarun Thakur, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=178
Datos IO provides an application-centric data management platform that helps businesses protect, mobilize and monetize their data across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The company launched its Rebellion Partner Program in July to support its growing base of resellers.
Datrium
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Brian Biles, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=179
Datrium provides converged infrastructure systems, including high-performance primary storage and cloud backup systems, for hybrid clouds. In October the company launched the next generation of its DVX appliances featuring end-to-end flash storage systems. The company was founded by executives from Data Domain and early principal engineers from VMware.
Diamanti
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Jeff Chou, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=180
Diamanti offers a hyper-converged storage and networking appliance used to move containerized applications from development to production. The system eliminates the input/output storage and networking bottlenecks and other challenges that containers pose to traditional IT systems.
E8 Storage
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Zivan Ori, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=181
E8 Storage develops high-performance, low-latency flash storage systems and storage management software. The company's systems, including the recently debuted E8-X24 centralized NVMe appliance, targets mission-critical applications such as financial trading, real-time analytics and web-based services. The company launched its inaugural channel partner program in June.
Elastifile
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Amir Aharoni, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=182
The Elastifile Cloud File System is a cross-cloud data fabric software product that provides unified access to file, object and block data stored in on-premise, cloud, virtualized and bare metal stack systems. On Nov. 2 Elastifile said it is integrating its software with Dell EMC servers to create a set of scale-out NAS storage appliances.
Excelero Storage
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Lior Gal, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=183
Excelero enables enterprises and service providers to design scale-out storage infrastructures that leverage standard servers and high-performance flash storage. Excelero's software-defined block storage solution, NVMesh, meets the performance and scalability requirements of the largest web-scale and enterprise applications.
Hedvig
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Avinash Lakshman, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=184
Hedvig develops software-defined storage technology for enterprises building private, hybrid or multi-cloud environments. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is designed for both primary and secondary data, making it available for virtualized, containerized and backup workloads. It consolidates block, file, and object data into a single, API-driven platform.
Igneous Systems Inc.
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=185
Igneous Systems designed its secondary storage technology to provide consolidated backup and archiving for massive file systems. Its hybrid cloud services – Igneous Storage, Igneous Backup and Igneous Archive – offer the convenience of on-premise data in enterprise datacenters and the agility of public cloud.
ioFabric
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Steven Lamb, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=188
ioFabric Vicinity is a multi-site, multi-cloud data fabric that ensures data protection and availability with industry-unique cost optimization features. Recently launched Vicinity 3.0 uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate storage cost optimization. ioFabric is targeting channel partners in North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific.
Infinidat
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Moshe Yanai, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=186
Infinidat develops the petabyte-scale, all-flash InfiniBox data storage systems, which the company said provides sub-millisecond latency, high reliability and hyper-scale capacity at lower total cost of ownership than traditional storage technologies. In October the company raised $95 million in Series C funding, bringing the startup's valuation to $1.6 billion.
Infrascale
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Ken Shaw, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=187
With the goal of eradicating downtime and data loss, Infrascale offers cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services providing automatic failover and recovery for data, applications, sites and systems including servers, desktops and laptops. Earlier this year Infrascale added support for the Google Cloud Platform to its lineup, which already supported Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
IT Glue
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Chris Day, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=189
IT Glue develops a documentation platform that managed service providers use to store and organize client information, helping MSPs increase the efficiency of their technicians and improve both customer satisfaction and profit margins.
pCloud
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Tunio Zafer, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=190
Pitching itself as an alternative to Dropbox and other cloud storage sites, pCloud provides a cloud-based storage service for both individuals and businesses with synchronization, security and encryption, file sharing and backup capabilities.
Primary Data
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Lance Smith, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=191
Primary Data's DataSphere platform is used to ensure data is in the right place across enterprise IT systems and the cloud. By separating the logical view of data from physical storage systems, the DataSphere metadata engine allows data to be placed where it's most needed, giving applications the ability to access data in parallel across multiple storage systems.
Qumolo
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Bill Richter, president and CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=192
In September Qumolo launched its "file fabric" (QF2) software, a highly scalable file storage system that provides the ability to store, manage and access globally distributed data sets, creating a single file domain that spans the data center and the cloud.
Rubrik
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Bipul Sinha, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=193
Rubrik's cloud data management system provides automated backup and recovery, replication, data archiving, cloud search and development in a platform built for hybrid cloud systems. In August the company launched its Service Delivery Partner program enabling MSPs and other partners to provide clients with a complete suite of automated data management services.
SoftNAS
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Rick Braddy, CEO and CTO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=194
SoftNAS develops a software-defined cloud data platform that creates a unified, integrated way to aggregate, transform, protect and store data, and create applications that bridge islands of data scattered across Software-as-a-Service applications. The system supports Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure public clouds and VMware-hosted private clouds.
StorPool Storage
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Boyan Ivanov, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=195
StorPool develops software-defined storage technology that runs on industry-standard servers, converting them into virtual SAN storage arrays by aggregating the servers' local drives into a shared pool of block storage. That, according to the company, provides an alternative to expensive and inefficient stand-alone storage array systems.
SwiftStack
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Don Jaworski, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=196
SwiftStack offers hybrid cloud storage software for customers that require universal access to petabytes of unstructured data in a single namespace. Media and entertainment companies, life sciences companies and web-based businesses are among SwiftStack's customers. The company recently updated its software with public cloud archiving, synchronization and multi-region data management capabilities.
Symply
Founded: 2015
Top Executive: Alex Grossman, President, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=197
Symply develops high-speed digital storage systems designed for media professionals. The company's products include the SymplyUltra platform, which combines the company's management software with Quantum's StorNext storage system, and the SymplyConveyor high-speed file transfer and sync application. The company recently introduced digital storage products specifically for news bureaus and sports organizations.
Wasabi Technologies
Founded: 2015
Top Executive: David Friend, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=198
Boldly competing with Amazon Web Services, Wasabi Technologies provides cloud storage services that it touts as being six times faster than AWS S3 at one-fifth the cost. Along with its price and performance advantages, Wasabi also trumpets the data protection capabilities of its service against accidental or malicious destruction, and against theft by hackers.
Zadara Storage
Founded: 2011
Top Executive: Nelson Nahum, CEO
Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2017-details.htm?c=199
Zadara Storage offers enterprise-class block, file and object storage with an agile, Storage-as-a-Service business model. The technology creates a unified experience across public cloud providers, on-premise deployments and hybrid configurations. Zadara's patented technology connects the robust features and security of enterprise storage with the flexibility and economics of the cloud.