Emerging Vendors 2018: Data Storage Companies You Need To Know

Over Capacity

Data continues to pile up with the global volume of digital data doubling every two years and, according to market researcher International Data Corp., reach 45,000 exabytes in 2020.

That's fueling demand for storage systems with ever-greater speed, capacity and functionality. To help meet that demand, a wave of startups offer innovative technology such as software-defined storage, flash storage and tiered storage, providing more efficient ways to store, manage and access all that data, either on premise or in the cloud.

As part of CRN's Emerging Vendors for 2018, here are 13 hot storage startups, founded in 2012 or later, that solution providers should be aware of.

Cohesity

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Founder, CEO Mohit Aron

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=110

Cohesity's DataPlatform transforms complex infrastructures and eliminates secondary storage silos with a single, purpose-built hyper-converged system. DataPlatform is designed to consolidate and manage all secondary data at web scale – including backups, test/development copies, files, analytics data and objects.

Datera

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: CEO Marc Fleischmann

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=111

Datera's Data Services Platform enables enterprises to adopt a modern, data-centric approach to orchestrating data and scaling application performance across an enterprise and cloud system without the limits imposed by storage silos and the constant management they require.

Excelero

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Lior Gal

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=112

Excelero develops software-defined block storage technology that enables customers to build distributed, high-performance server SANs with standard hardware. The company's NVMesh, for web and enterprise applications at any scale, provide the benefits of local flash performance with the convenience of centralized storage.

Hedvig

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Founder, CEO Avinash Lakshman

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=113

Hedvig's Distributed Storage Platform provides software-defined storage for primary and secondary applications for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Capabilities like replication policy, deduplication, compression and encryption can be enabled per application and scale to multi-petabytes.

Igneous Systems

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: CEO Kiran Bhageshpur

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=114

Igneous Systems provides a backup, archive and cloud-tiering solution for unstructured data at scale. The Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud streamlines data management for billions of files across petabytes of data, both on-premises systems and in the cloud.

Morro Data

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: CEO Paul Tien

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=115

Morro Data's CloudNAS hybrid-cloud storage service is designed to deliver the performance of on-premises systems with the scale, flexibility and cost of the cloud. Morro says it is ideal for SMB/SME businesses with hundreds of users that require large capacity across multiple locations.

Qumulo

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: CEO Bill Richter

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=116

Qumulo, a manufacturer of all-flash storage systems, developed the File Fabric (QF2) highly scalable file storage system that runs in the data center and the public cloud. QF2, according to the company, is ideal for data-intensive industries with multi-petabyte data sets.

Quobyte

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Bjorn Kolbeck

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=117

Quobyte markets a next-generation data center file system that runs on commodity hardware to create software-based storage that dramatically improves scalability, performance and operational efficiency for data-intensive workloads like high-performance computing, analytics, autonomous machines, and media and entertainment.

Reduxio

Founded: 2012

Top Executive: Chief Security Officer Ori Bendori

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=118

Reduxio's flagship product, the TimeOS storage operating system, provides breakthrough storage efficiency and performance, eliminating the need for snapshots or backups, and offers the unique ability to recover data to any second in time.

Storbyte

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Co-Founder, Chief Evangelist, Design Architect Diamond Lauffin

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=119

Storbyte brought to the commercial storage market an advanced design in flash storage systems with entirely new and innovative SSD technology. Storbyte's arrays maximize efficiency, normalize and improve IOPS and performance, and increase rack density.

Symply

Founded: 2015

Top Executive: Global Distribution CEO Keith Warburton

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=120

Symply manufactured high-performance storage systems with a focus on collaborative workflows, AI, media production and other applications. On July 2, Cambridge, U.K.-based Global Distribution acquired Symply's assets and continues to sell Symply products.

Vexata

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Zahid Hussain

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=121

Vexata's VX-100 Scalable Storage Systems is a line of high-performance, solid-state data platforms that provide in-box scaling, fully utilizing flash and memory NVMe media for unmatched economics and business application scaling.

Wasabi Technologies

Founded: 2015

Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO David Friend

Emerging vendor details: /rankings-and-lists/ev2018-details.htm?c=122

Wasabi touts its AWS S3-compatible Hot Cloud Storage offering as providing six times the performance of S3 at roughly one-fifth the price. A Hot Cloud Storage client for Mac and Windows devices is currently in beta.