Startup Talena Debuts Big Data Availability Management System

Businesses are getting wise to the fact that their company data is one of their most valuable corporate assets. They're also figuring out they need a better way to manage those assets.

Startup Talena has exited stealth mode and begun selling its Talena Big Data Availability Management software, designed to optimize data management across such processes as application development and test, database management, backup and recovery, and data archiving.

Talena, founded in 2013 and based in Milpitas, Calif., also revealed that it raised $12 million in Series A financing from Canaan Partners, Intel Capital, ONSET Ventures and Wipro Ventures.

[Related: 2015 Big Data: Data Management]

Talena is debuting its software at a time when structured and unstructured data assets are increasingly spread across a broad range of platforms, including Hadoop, NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB, analytic databases such as Hewlett-Packard's Vertica and Cloudera's Impala, and processing engines such as Spark. That's led to an explosion of new applications being developed to run on those platforms.

"Traditional data management software doesn't support modern application lifecycles, so application development and test, and application recovery costs are increasing," said chief marketing officer Sanjay Sarathy in an interview with CRN.

Current-generation data management technologies aren't able to scale up to handle the hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes of data that IT systems need to serve up for production and analytical applications, Sarathy said. Most conk out at tens of terabytes, he said.

"As Big Data applications grow in size and scope, companies need to rethink the data management architecture required to support their SLA goals," said Talena founder and CEO Nitin Donde in a statement. "Today, companies often write one-off scripts to create backup copies or to move data to test/dev sandboxes or for archival purposes. This approach isn't scalable and makes it difficult to recover data as needed, and results in increased capital and operational burdens."

The Talena platform was developed on a petabyte-scale architecture and is designed to manage thousands of nodes in distributed environments. It provides storage reduction techniques optimized for diverse data formats and supports data-aware workflows beyond traditional file-based approaches. And it supports compute and storage pools based on commodity hardware and storage systems.

Talena's software, which includes a data management console and a growing catalog of connectors to diverse data sources, also prevents data loss and helps organizations prioritize data management tasks for compliance and risk management purposes, Sarathy said.

Talena has been working directly with early-adopter customers for about three months, according to Sarathy. The company will use the new financing to expand its sales and marketing efforts "and start aggressively selling the product," he said. Ultimately that will include working through multiple channels including solution providers, systems integrators and data platform resellers.

PUBLISHED AUG. 20, 2015