Emerging Storage Vendors To Know In 2019

As part of CRN's Emerging Vendors for 2019, here are 13 hot storage and disaster recovery startups, founded in 2013 or later, that solution providers should be aware of.

The New Generation Of Storage Leaders

The global datasphere, the collective total of digital data, is expected to explode from 33 zettabytes last year to 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to an IDC report. While some of that will reside in PCs, smartphones and other devices, a great deal of it will be stored in traditional data center systems and in public and private cloud storage systems.

IT managers are increasingly challenged to effectively store and manage all that data, tasks that require increasingly sophisticated data storage, archiving, backup and disaster recovery technologies and services – either for on-premise use of in the cloud.

While the IT industry's leading vendors are all big players in data storage, startups develop many of the most innovative technologies being offered today – in hardware, software and cloud services – for primary storage, secondary storage and archiving, backup and disaster recovery.

As part of CRN's 2019 Emerging Vendors coverage, here are 13 hot storage and disaster recovery startups, founded in 2013 or later, that solution providers should be aware of.

Aparavi

Founded: 2016

Top Executive: Adrian Knapp, Founder, CEO

Aparavi's intelligent multi-cloud data management software actively manages data for long-term policy-based retention, access and reuse, while providing an easy path to multi-cloud adoption. The SaaS offering helps organizations looking to unlock the value of large volumes of unstructured data.

ClearSky Data

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Ellen Rubin, Co-Founder, CEO

ClearSky Data provides enterprise storage as a hybrid cloud service, delivering on-demand primary storage, off-site backup and disaster recovery as a single service. The startup raised $20 million in venture financing in November 2018.

Cohesity

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Mohit Aron, Founder, CEO

Cohesity consolidates secondary storage silos into a hyper-converged data platform that spans private and public clouds, providing a global data store for backup, test and development, file services and analytic data sets.

Datera

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Guy Churchward, CEO

Datera provides software-defined enterprise storage systems for global 2000 companies and cloud service providers. Datera said it recorded 400 percent growth in the first quarter of 2019.

Elastifile

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Erwan Menard, CEO

Elastifile’s technology helps organizations augment their cloud capabilities with scalable, cloud-native, enterprise file Storage as a Service. Google is acquiring Elastifile in a move to expand its Google Cloud file storage services offerings.

Excelero

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Lior Gal, Co-Founder, CEO

Excelero delivers distributed, software-defined block storage technology for web-scale applications, including AI, machine learning and GPU computing. Inspired by shared-nothing architectures, Excelero's NVMesh system meets the low-latency performance and scalability requirements of the largest web-scale and enterprise applications.

HYCU

Founded: 2018

Top Executive: Simon Taylor, CEO

HYCU provides fully automated data protection, monitoring, and backup and recovery software to support hyper-converged infrastructure and multi-cloud IT systems. In April the company extended its Backup as a Service to Google Cloud services such as Google Cloud SQL.

Komprise

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Kumar Goswami, CEO

A developer of intelligent data management technology, Komprise's mission is to help businesses handle the incoming tsunami of data with intelligent automation software that adapts to the customer's environment and scales across their storage silos without creating new ones.

Quobyte

Founded: 2013

Top Executive: Bjorn Kolbeck, Co-Founder, CEO

Quobyte's software turns commodity x86 servers into unified, high-performance, scalable storage systems. The product eliminates data silos by utilizing commodity hard drives, solid state drives and NVM (non-volatile memory), providing unified, multi-interface access with common authentication and access control lists.

Rubrik

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Bipul Sinha, Co-Founder, CEO

Rubrik provides a single platform for managing and protecting data in the cloud, on-premises and at the edge. Its flagship product, Rubrik Cloud Data Management, is joined by Rubrik Polaris and Rubrik Datos IO. The company raised $261 million in funding in January.

Storbyte

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Steve Groenke, CEO

Storbyte manufactures enterprise storage arrays that offer performance, power management, reliability, density, efficiency, flexibility and affordability. Its line of hardware-defined storage products is designed with a patented, abstracted command and control capability layer over a commodity-based, multi-mode, direct chip-access architecture.

Vexata

Founded: 2014

Top Executive: Zahid Hussain, Founder, CEO

Vexata provides active data infrastructure, based on non-volatile memory flash storage technology, that accelerates data I/O-intensive applications. Vexata was just acquired by StorCentric, that company's fourth acquisition in less than a year.

Wasabi Technologies

Founded: 2015

Top Executive: David Friend, Founder, President, CEO

Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage provides enterprise-class cloud storage that is one-fifth the price of major cloud vendors and operates up to six times faster. The Storage-as-a-Service startup, created by the founders of Carbonite, recently launched the Wasabi Partner Network program.