The 10 Hottest Storage Startup Companies Of 2018

CRN looks at 10 startup storage vendors that in 2018 made headlines as they came out of stealth or unveiled their first storage products.

A Startup Is Born

This year's crop of storage startups have a lot of dreams--and investor funding--riding on them. A couple may grow to become independent storage vendors, some may be swallowed up by larger vendors looking to make their point technologies part of a larger solution, and a couple might just disappear.

But they all have to start somewhere. The ten companies highlighted here, along with other of their peers who could not be included (this is a "10 Hottest" list, after all), are new to the market, having in the last year or two come out of stealth and started shipping product. They are mainly software companies, mainly focused on the cloud, but demonstrate a variety of approaches to storage.

Check out our take on the hottest storage startups of 2018 in this slideshow.

Aparavi

CEO: Adrian Knapp

Aparavi provides clients with the ability to manage unstructured data growth across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company claims its SaaS-based Active Archive technology reduces secondary storage growth by up to 75 percent, which reins in both backups and secondary storage growth while scaling to petabytes of data in a pay-as-you-go fashion without vendor lock-in.

Attala Systems

President and CTO: Sujith Arramreddy

Attala, based in San Jose, Calif., is a developer of what it calls composable storage infrastructure based on a scale-out fabric that uses standard Ethernet networks to interconnect multiple servers and storage nodes. The fabric dynamically attaches NVMe volumes from serverless storage nodes to servers, virtual machines, or containers where the applications reside with latencies as low as 15 microseconds.

Burlywood

CEO: Tod Earhart

Burlywood offers a platform on which high-performance storage controllers can be built to OEM designs based on customer-specified requirements across interfaces, protocols, FTL, QoS, capacity, flash types, and form-factor. The Longmont, Colo.-based company's TrueFlash modular flash storage architecture provides fast time to market for new flash technology. The company most recently introduced the ability to work with NVMe.

Cloud Daddy

Founder/CEO: Joe Merces

Princeton, N.J.-based Cloud Daddy in late June entered the storage market with Secure Backup that combines AWS-native backup and disaster recovery, security, and infrastructure management into a single offering. Secure Backup, available in versions ranging from free to enterprise class, provides a full range of multi-tenant data protection and recovery capabilities along with full security capabilities including instance firewall and rules and security group management.

FileShadow

President and CEO: Tyrone Pike

FileShadow provides a service that aggregates files from multiple sources into a single secure and searchable cloud vault. The Provo, Utah-based company supports multiple cloud storage sources, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe's Lightroom solutions, Apple's iCloud Drive files and iCloud Photos, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, and Drobo NAS/DAS devices.

HYCU

CEO: Simon Taylor

HYCU, pronounced "haiku," is the Boston-based developer of data protection technology originally developed specifically for hyper-converged infrastructure environments. The company early this year was spun out of Netherlands-based Comtrade Software. HYCU's data protection technology originally developed San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix's hyper-converged infrastructure platform, but now also works with Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware's ESX hypervisor.

Morro Data

CEO/Founder: Paul Tien

Fremont, Calif.-based Morro Data's CloudNAS hybrid cloud file services works from single devices to multi-sight enterprises to provide primary and archive storage and instant file sync and share and collaboration across multiple sites. It combines fast file access and the NAS SMB interface of the company's CacheDrive to treat cloud-based storage as if it were a local NAS file server.

Liqid

CEO/Co-founder: Sumit Puri

The Liqid Composable technology from Broomfield, Colo.-based Liqid leverages industry-standard compute, networking, storage, and GPU components to deliver a scalable architecture built from pools of disaggregated resources. These resources can be disaggregated, pooled, orchestrated, and repurposed across PCIe fabric on demand at the bare-metal level with sub-microsecond latencies.

Salvobit

CTO/Co-founder: Ivan Georgiev

Salvobit of Sofia, Bulgaria develops technology for building secure peer-to-peer storage for storing and protecting confidential information while providing cross-platform collaboration. Data is protected by end-to-end encryption. The sharing of the data is enabled with a combination of a public key, which is the user's IT, and a private key which ensures unauthorized users cannot access it.

Termaxia

CEO: Changbin Liu

Termaxia develops exabyte-scale high-performance big data storage systems for both object data with APIs for Amazon S3 and OpenStack and file data with APIs for POSIX, NFS, and Hadoop. The Philadelphia-based company claims that, compared to conventional systems, its platform uses less than one-fifth the power and requires less than half the hardware, yet offers drop-in deployment and easy management and monitoring.