The 10 Coolest Storage Startups Of 2012 (So Far)

With Startups, Better Hurry!

Before launching into the 10 coolest storage startups for 2012 so far, it's worth taking a minute to note a couple companies that would normally qualify for such a list but were acquired in the second quarter of this year, including:

The lesson here? If you see a new vendor you like, better quickly partner up with it or risk starting up with a larger parent company later.

Actifio

Actifio, Waltham, Mass., is a startup developer of the Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform, which it claims allows businesses to instantly recover any data.

PAS eliminates multiple copies of files to reduce the data footprint by up to 90 percent, Actifio claims. Unlike traditional storage systems that create multiple copies of data for such purposes as storing the data, replicating it, restoring it and testing new applications, Actifio allows a single copy of the data to be used to recreate any version of the data from any point in time.

Actifio in March hired former Cisco and VCE channel executive Russell Rosa (left) to serve as its new vice president of worldwide channels.

Bitcasa

Bitcasa, Mountain View, Calif., develops cloud storage technology that promises unlimited storage capacity, file sharing and mobile device data sync for $10 per month. Data on the Bitcasa cloud is encrypted and deduped on the client side before it is uploaded to the cloud, where only a single copy of duplicate blocks of data is stored.

The company expects customers will eventually store all their data in its cloud while maintaining as large a local cache as they require for storing frequently accessed data. The local cache also predicts which data will be accessed beforehand so it can download it from the cloud to the device.

GreenBytes

Ashaway, R.I.-based SSD array developer GreenBytes in May closed a $12-million B round of funding aimed at helping continue development of its all-SSD and hybrid SSD-hard drive storage solutions.

GreenBytes in 2010 came to market with its first array, a hybrid appliance called the HA-3000, which features both SSDs and spinning hard drives with a single controller. It targets the backup market by providing high-speed data deduplication.

The company more recently introduced its Solidarity, an all-SSD array with dual controllers targeting the primary storage array market for SMB customers.

Inktank

Los Angeles-based startup Inktank, founded by the developer of the open-source Ceph scalable distributed storage system, in May came out of stealth mode to provide enterprise-level support for customers looking to use Ceph to build scalable storage infrastructures.

Ceph is an open-source storage technology that provides object, block and file storage in a single file system for unified storage. It was originally developed as a Ph.D. project to solve issues related to scaling metadata in high-performance computing applications.

CEO and Chief Architect of Inktank Sage Weil (left) is also the original developer of Ceph.

Nimbus Data

Based in San Francisco, Nimbus Data is the developer of all-solid state storage systems featuring enterprise-grade Flash memory. The arrays scale from 2.5 TB to 500 TB and feature up to 800,000 4-KB block I/Os per second speed. They also support multipathing, clustering and no single point of failure.

The company's file system includes such features as inline deduplication, thin provisioning, snapshots, and synchronous mirroring and asynchronous replication.

Nimbus Data in January introduced its first formal channel program.

Pure Storage

Pure Storage, based in Mountain View, Calif., develops storage arrays based on Flash memory technology instead of hard drives, and in May introduced its first products, a line of Flash memory-based arrays it said are priced competitively with traditional hard drive-based arrays.

The company claims its Pure Storage FlashArray 2.0 offers ten times the performance of a disk array while being smaller and easier to install, and yet it is priced similar to a disk array, thanks to its use of low-cost, multilevel cell (MLC) Flash technology instead of the more robust and more expensive single-level cell (SLC) or enhanced MLC (eMLC) technologies. It uses software to ensure the reliability of the MLC Flash memory.

Starboard Storage

New Jersey-based Starboard Storage Systems in February came out of stealth mode with a channel-only model for its new AC72 storage architecture, designed to handle mixed workloads including structured, unstructured and virtualized data with a single platform.

The AC72 pools hard drives and SSDs into one dynamic storage pool that can be carved up as needed for mixed workloads. Included is an SSD accelerator tier that adds performance to the storage operations, as well as I/O monitoring technology that automatically tiers storage as needed.

The AC72 storage node is fully redundant with no single point of failure and comes in two main versions, including one optimized for storage performance and the other optimized for storage capacity.

StorSimple

StorSimple, Santa Clara, Calif., in April started selling a new series of storage appliances featuring local capacity of up to 100 TB integrated with cloud-based primary, archive, backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

The new line from StorSimple ranges in terms of on-premise capacity from 10 TB to 100 TB, after dedupe and compression. One new feature, Cloud Snap, puts data snapshots on the cloud that can be used to quickly recover data even if the application that produced the data is not available. The appliances also let data be recovered to the original customer site or, in a disaster, in a remote site.

Symform

Symform, developer of a distributed storage cloud that backs up one user's data across multiple users' storage devices, in April closed a new $8 million investment round.

The Seattle-based company's Resilient Storage Architecture breaks up a customer's data into 64-MB blocks, encrypts them with AES-256 encryption technology, breaks those blocks into 1-MB fragments, adds 32 more 1-MB fragments for parity and then scatters them across storage nodes contributed by other customers.

Those cloud storage nodes are simply space on one or more hard drives contributed by each customer via the Internet. The amount each customer contributes depends on how much cloud storage capacity the customer wishes to access. Each customer pays $50 per server per month with no limit on usage.

Tintri

Tintri, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of storage appliances aimed specifically at handling storage in virtualized environments, in February demonstrated its new Tintri VMstore T540 appliance, the company's second-generation virtual machine-aware storage appliance.

New features include dual storage controllers, expanded usable capacity of up to 13.5 TB in a 3U form factor, end-to-end latency that allows admins to visualize performance bottlenecks and a virtual machine auto-alignment feature that automates the process of aligning virtual machines to the storage layer. The T540 also includes a new four-hour support option that Tintri said guarantees it will respond to any issue within a short window.