20 Data Storage Companies to Watch

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Today’s data storage startups are venturing well beyond basic file storage and object storage. Innovators are helping enterprises cope with storage management and data protection issues that arise when they park vital business information on multiple clouds or enabling high-performance storage services that can keep up with demanding big data analytics and AI workloads.

Here are 20 data storage startups that are pushing the storage industry in new and exciting directions.

Aparavi

Headquarters: Santa Monica, CA

Founded: 2016

Leadership: Adrian Knapp, Chairman and CEO

The cloud data protection specialist’s SaaS-based platform enables short and long-term data retention across multiple cloud storage services, allowing enterprises to quickly switch providers based on changing requirements, costs and other factors. Policy-based data pruning technology allows users to lower their storage requirements and attain greater cost efficiencies.

ClearSky Data

Headquarters: Boston, MA

Founded: 2014

Leadership: Ellen Rubin, CEO and Co-Founder

ClearSky Data consolidates primary storage, offsite backup and disaster recovery into a single service and enables businesses to access their on-premise and cloud data without replicating it. The company recently added scale-up NAS capabilities to accommodate the large enterprise file workloads.

Cloudistics (acquired by Fungible)

Headquarters: Reston, VA

Founded: 2013

Leadership: Najaf Husain, CEO and Co-Founder

Although it seems that businesses of all sizes and types are flocking to the public cloud, mounting concerns about security, regulatory compliance and complexity in storage management are giving many businesses second thoughts. Cloudistics makes it possible for enterprises to repatriate their data using the company’s hyperconverged storage platform to deploy their own private clouds.

Datrium

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA

Founded: 2012

Leadership: Brian Biles, CEO and Co-Founder

Converged storage meets the cloud with Datrium’s software platform. It combines primary storage and backups, along with compute, to enable high-performance hybrid cloud storage workloads and data protection. The company recently released DVX 4.0 Software with improved virtual machine fault tolerance and Cloud DVX, a SaaS-based virtual machine backup and recovery offering.

Elastifile

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA

Founded: 2013

Leadership: Amir Aharoni, CEO and Co-Founder

Spanning on-premises and cloud-based data storage, Elastifile’s data fabric provides distributed file system services. Meant to “open up” storage siloes, the company’s flash-native technology makes enterprise data globally available without having to copy it across the network.

Excelero

Headquarters: San Jose, CA

Founded: 2014

Leadership: Lior Gal, CEO and Co-Founder

Aimed at large-scale and mixed application workload environments, Excelero’s software-defined block storage technology, called NVMesh, enables enterprises to create high-performance, distributed server SAN using commodity hardware. It pools NVMe SSD storage and delivers networked storage services at flash-like speeds and low latencies.

Hedvig

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA

Founded: 2012

Leadership: Avinash Lakshman, CEO and Founder

Hedvig’s virtualization and container-friendly distributed storage platform works for both primary and secondary data. Using the company’s Universal Data Plane technology on commodity servers and cloud services, organizations can consolidate block, file and object storage.

Igneous Systems

Headquarters: Seattle, WA

Founded: 2013

Leadership: Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO

The Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud platform provides secondary storage as a service for enterprises with expansive file systems. Its cloud-tiering capabilities enable organizations to automatically replicate data to the cloud while its low-impact backup services provide data protection with little additional overhead.

Leonovus

Headquarters: Ottawa, Ontario

Founded:2010

Leadership: Michael John Gaffney, Chairman and CEO

Offering enterprise storage and data protection, the company prides itself on distributed, ultra-secure storage services. Leonovus employs encryption and blockchain technology to ensure data consistency across on-premises, cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Minio

Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA

Founded:2014

Leadership: Anand Babu Periasamy, CEO and Co-Founder

Minio’s open-source, Amazon S3-compatible object server enables organizations to float their own private clouds. For the increasing number of enterprises that have jumped on the container bandwagon, the official Minio Docker image can be used to launch an object storage server that supports S3 in mere seconds.

NooBaa

Headquarters: Isreal

Founded:2013

Leadership: Michael Thompson, CEO

Named to Enterprise Storage Forum’s recent shortlist of object storage vendors, this startup’s software-defined data platform is designed for distributed hybrid environments. An AWS S3 compatible API provides access while NooBaa keeps costs in check with inline deduplication and compression.

Nyriad

Headquarters: New Zealand

Founded: 2014

Leadership: Matthew Simmons, CEO and Co-Founder

Spun out from research for the massive Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, Nyriad uses graphical processing units (GPU), hardware components that pump out pixels and accelerate AI workloads, as an alternative to RAID. Compatible with Linux file systems and applications, the company’s NSULATE storage processing platform delivers real-time erasure coding and corruption recovery on a hyperscale level.

OpenIO

Headquarters: France

Founded: 2015

Leadership: Laurent Denel, CEO and Co-Founder

OpenIO’s software-defined storage (SDS) software turns off-the-shelf hardware into pools of compute and object storage resources. The platform can scale from a handful of terabytes to thousands of petabytes.

Portworx

Headquarters: Los Altos, CA

Founded: 2014

Leadership: Murli Thirumale, CEO and Co-Founder

A container-friendly storage startup, the Portworx aggregated data layer provides persistent storage, enabling storage volumes that can follow containers when they make a move. The DevOps-enabling software is aimed at production workloads and is compatible with Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS and Docker Swarm.

Reduxio

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Founded: 2012

Leadership: Ori Bendori, CEO

Blurring the lines between primary and secondary storage, TimeOS, which the company describes as a storage operating system, uses flash-based storage to provide enterprises with automated tiering and global data reduction services. But its claim to fame is near-instant recovery times, enabling businesses to resume failed applications without missing a step.

StorageOS

Headquarters: London, UK

Founded: 2015

Leadership: Chris Brandon, CEO and Founder

Yet another storage startup targeting the white-hot container market, this company recently celebrated the general availability of its persistent storage platform for containers. StorageOS integrates with Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift and Red Hat and works both in the cloud and on-premises infrastructures.

Storj Labs

Headquarters: Atlanta, GA

Founded: 2014

Leadership: Ben Golub, Executive Chairman and Interim CEO

Can crowdsourcing storage capacity help businesses cope with growing data volumes? Storj Labs is betting it can by allowing users to essentially rent out their spare capacity, which is then made available to customers on its distributed storage system.

Vexata

Headquarters: San Jose, CA

Founded:2014

Leadership: Zahid Hussain, CEO and Founder

Enterprises venturing into big data analytics or advanced machine learning may discover that legacy storage systems aren’t quite up to the task. Vexata’s storage systems employ NVMe SSDs (VX-100F) and Intel Optane memory-class storage (VX-100M) for blistering database, business intelligence and AI performance.

Wasabi Technologies

Headquarters: Boston, MA

Founded:2016

Leadership: David Friend, CEO and Co-founder

Wasabi promises “hot cloud storage” that is 80 percent cheaper and six times faster than Amazon S3. If that’s not enough to get businesses onboard, the company is sweetening with deal with unlimited, no-fee egress.

WekaIO

Headquarters: San Jose, CA

Founded:2013

Leadership: Liran Zvibel, CEO and Co-Founder

Running in the cloud or on-premises, using standard server hardware no less, WekaIO Matrix delivers a high-performance parallel file system aimed at demanding HPC workloads like deep learning. The startup’s tech slashes the time it takes to complete intensive tasks by ensuring that GPUs and CPUs aren’t left waiting for data.

Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez is a contributor to Datamation, eWEEK, and the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Previously, he served as a managing editor for the Internet.com network of IT-related websites and as the Green IT curator for GigaOM Pro.

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