The 50 Coolest Software-Defined Storage Vendors: The 2025 Storage 100
As part of CRN’s 2025 Storage 100, here are 50 vendors bringing software capabilities, services and cloud connectivity to storage technology.
No more. The value of storage, whether it is targeted at capacity versus performance or at primary versus secondary, depends squarely on the software. With relatively few exceptions, the value of the underlying hardware has diminished. In many cases, this may not be immediately obvious given that a lot of storage that is still acquired is packaged as a turnkey offering bundling hardware with the software. But it becomes all too obvious when vendors increasingly offer cloud-only versions or virtual versions of their storage systems. And what are they? It’s the software removed from the underlying hardware and modified to work on any hardware or, if in the cloud, no set hardware at all.
And when that software is sold as part of a turnkey system? The hardware is almost always industry-standard servers. That hardware may come from various vendors, either branded or more likely from a large international contract manufacturer. But the value of the system is in the software.
That is why CRN no longer refers to storage hardware when it comes to the Storage 100. The focus on this section is on software-designed storage. Which pretty much covers nearly all of this part of the industry.
As part of CRN’s 2025 Storage 100, here are 50 vendors bringing software capabilities, services and cloud connectivity to storage technology.
Amax
Jerry Shih, CEO
AI is the watchword at Amax as the company has gone all in on AI across its server, storage and data center technologies. The company is a longtime partner of Nvidia, AMD and Intel, working with them to develop advanced servers. Amax, a Foxconn Technology Group affiliate, is also a pioneer in the development of liquid-cooled servers.
Broadcom
Hock Tan, President, CEO
Broadcom is a major player in the storage market in large part because of its ownership of VMware, one of the original developers of software-defined storage. Storage is a key component of VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation. Broadcom is also a top developer of storage components including storage controllers, adapters and switches.
Cloudian
Michael Tso, Co-Founder, CEO
Cloudian develops AWS S3-compatible file and object storage systems. The company’s HyperStore peer-to-peer scale-out cloud-native storage platform is aimed at enterprises looking to managing their growing unstructured data stores. Cloudian is available through solution providers and through such third-party partners as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Lenovo, Amazon Web Services and Supermicro.
CTERA
Oded Nagel, CEO
CTERA develops a unified platform that integrates local file services at the edge with scalable and efficient cloud storage to provide a comprehensive edge-to-cloud file storage, collaboration and data protection offering to support modern enterprises’ needs for speed, security and compliance.
DataCore
Dave Zabrowski, CEO
DataCore is a pioneer developer of software-defined storage, being among the first to develop storage virtualization that runs on any hardware to store and manage data across core, edge and cloud environments. The company in mid-2024 raised $60 million in funding to accelerate growth. DataCore early this year acquired Arcastream’s parallel file system business.
DDN
Alex Bouzari, Co-Founder, CEO
DDN specializes in storage for high-performance computing needs and is a leader in providing storage with the kind of performance required for AI use. DDN’s storage technology is already supporting over 500,000 GPUs across industries and supports up to 100,000 GPUs in a single cluster. Blackstone in January invested $300 million in DDN, giving it a $5 billion valuation.
Dell Technologies
Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, CEO
Dell’s 2016 acquisition of EMC instantly made it the largest storage vendor, and the company has since maintained its top spot while growing the breadth of its storage offerings. The company provides a wide range of block, file, object and unified storage technology, as well as advanced software-defined and multi-cloud storage technologies.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Antonio Neri, President, CEO
HPE offers one of the widest storage portfolios from tape backup to its HPE GreenLake technology, as well as management software and hyperconverged infrastructure. HPE GreenLake for File Storage brings enterprise-grade scale-out file storage to data-intensive workloads, while HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition lets businesses build a self-service, self-managed private cloud on demand.
Hitachi Vantara
Sheila Rohra, CEO
Hitachi Vantara, the data-driven digital products and services business of Japan-based Hitachi, remains a storage powerhouse with a wide range of technologies including its hybrid cloud storage platform, converged and hyperconverged systems, Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, and its high-performance Hitachi iQ AI solution stack for enterprise AI and machine learning workloads.
Huawei
Zhengfei Ren, Director, CEO
Despite being one of the world’s largest storage vendors, China-based Huawei remains relatively unknown in the U.S. due to allegations the company has close ties to the Chinese government and thereby presents a security risk. Despite being shut out of the world’s largest IT market, Huawei still brings leading-edge storage technologies to much of the developed and developing world.
IBM
Arvind Krishna, Chairman, CEO
IBM has a long history with storage and currently offers one of the widest ranges of any vendor, with offerings including high-performance flash-based systems, storage for mainframe and open systems, hyperconverged infrastructure for Red Hat and watsonx deployments, tape storage, storage networking, and data resiliency software to protect data and recover it quickly if needed.
Impossible Cloud
Kai Wawrzinek, Co-Founder, CEO
Impossible Coud develops a decentralized cloud architecture based on web3 technology and using a global network of enterprise-grade data centers to provide high-performance, secure, Kubernetes-friendly and S3-compatible object storage for big data, data protection and archiving.
Infinidat
Phil Bullinger, CEO
Infinidat develops enterprise-class data storage, data protection, business continuity and cloud storage based on the same fundamental technology foundation, the InfuzeOS software-defined storage architecture and the InfuzeOS Cloud Edition. Infinidat is currently in the process of being acquired by Lenovo.
iXsystems
Mike Lauth, Co-Founder, CEO
iXsystems is the company behind TrueNAS, with over 15 million downloads and over 1 million community members. TrueNAS is based on the opensource ZFS file system to provide scale-up or scale-out unified storage for virtualization, backup and many other data-heavy workloads.
JetStor
Jim Gallagher, President, CEO
JetStor was founded 31 years ago as Advanced Computer & Network Corp. (AC&NC), but in 2024 was renamed JetStor. At the same time, it brought on a new CEO as company founder Gene Leyzarovich is now helping the company behind the scenes. JetStor’s product line ranges from NVMe all-flash storage to SAN and NAS systems to tape libraries.
Lenovo
Yuanqing Yang, Chairman, CEO
Lenovo, while later to the enterprise storage business than some of its key systems rivals, has over the last few years built a strong storage line all-flash storage and disk storage systems, Fibre Channel switches and hyperconverged infrastructure. However, the company is about to jump to a new level of storage with its pending acquisition of Infinidat.
Lightbits Labs
Eran Kirzner, Co-Founder, CEO
Lightbits Labs was a pioneer in the development of the NVMe/TCP storage protocol for high-speed storage over standard Ethernet TCP/IP networks. The company develops software-defined block storage technology with built-in intelligent flash management to help optimize price and performance. Systems using the software feature a disaggregated architecture for cloud-scale deployments.
Linbit
Philipp Reisner, Co-Founder, CEO
Linbit is the company behind the open-source storage software DRBD and LINSTOR. The company says it has over 3 million users worldwide of its high-availability, disaster recovery, software-defined storage, storage replication, virtualization, OEM, cloud data services and flash storage products, as well as support and training.
Liqid
Edgar Masri, CEO
Liqid develops a composable infrastructure hardware and software platform that lets businesses manage, scale out and configure physical bare-metal servers and storage using industry-standard data center components including compute, networking, storage and GPUs. Those components are interconnected over intelligent fabrics that can be configured to provide the exact physical resources per application.
MinIO
Anand Babu Periasamy, Co-Founder, CEO
MinIO develops an open-source cloud storage software, AIStor, an AWS S3-compatible technology that addresses the demands of unstructured data growth with replication, encryption, object immutability, identity and access management, information life cycle and more. An AI-optimized version was launched in November. MinIO’s investors include Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital.
NetApp
George Kurian, CEO
NetApp has come far in its journey from pioneering NAS technology to becoming a leader in bringing on-premises storage to the cloud. The company has transformed its on-premise storage software into cloud-native storage software with the support of the top three cloud hyperscalers even as it continues to develop new hardware appliances aimed at cost-optimizing physical storage.
Nexsan
Vincent Phillips, CEO
Nexsan was among the first to challenge EMC for large-scale storage with its old ATABoy and ATABeast lines. In 2023 it was acquired by Serene Investment Management, which brought the company cash, a new CEO and a bright, growing future.
Nutanix
Rajiv Ramaswami, President, CEO
No company has done a better job of taking advantage of the turmoil caused by Broadcom’s VMware acquisition than Nutanix, a pioneer in developing the hyperconverged infrastructure business. Focused now on building hybrid multi-cloud infrastructures, Nutanix is also pushing hard to bring AI to the cloud with its latest cloud-native technology, Nutanix Enterprise AI.
Open-E
Krzysztof (Kristof) Franek, President, CEO
Open-E was making storage-defined software long before almost anyone else. The company’s flagship offering is Open-E JovianDSS, a ZFS-based and Linux-based software designed for dynamic enterprise environments. It can be used for data storage, backups, business continuity and disaster recovery. The software can be deployed by channel partners or as part of a complete system by OEM storage providers.
OpenDrives
Sean Lee, CEO
OpenDrives develops custom enterprise-scale storage systems based on its Atlas storage software. Atlas allows customers’ storage systems to be configured with hard drive, all-flash, or hybrid disk and flash options. Applications can be run in containerized environments. The company has a strong media and entertainment focus, with customers including Disney, Warner Brothers, HBO, NBC and CNN.
Osnexus
Steven Umbehocker, Founder, CEO
Osnexus is the developer of the QuantaStor grid-scale software-defined storage platform, which provides unified file, block and object storage for backup, archive, server virtualization, big data, cloud computing and high-performance storage environments. The company’s most recent version, QuantaStor 6.5, includes anomaly detection to help identify anomalous network share usage.
Panzura
Dan Waldschmidt, CEO
Panzura started out developing a cloud storage gateway for moving data in and out of the cloud. That technology evolved into the Panzura CloudFS hybrid cloud file services platform and the Panzura Symphony data services platform. Together, the two help infrastructure and operations leaders understand their data, control costs, mitigate data damage and accelerate productivity.
Peak:AIO
Roger Cummings, CEO
Peak:AIO develops software-defined storage in two flavors. The company’s AI Data Server software uses GPUDirect and RDMA protocols to deliver data at over 40 GBps in a 2U server for AI applications, while Peak:Archive is a base for all-flash data archiving and ransomware protection systems. The company works with channel partners as well as Dell and PNY.
Pure Storage
Charles Giancarlo, Chairman, CEO
While Pure Storage wasn’t the first to develop all-flash storage, it was the first to make flash storage the heart of everything it does. The company produces its own DirectFlash Modules and is also unique in its Evergreen Storage as a Service, which features non-disruptive upgrades forever.
Qnap Systems
Jack Liou, CEO
Qnap develops and manufactures software and hardware around storage, networking, and smart video technologies. On the storage side, this includes NAS appliances led by an all-flash model. The company’s flagship offering is the Qnap Cloud NAS based on QuTScloud, a cloud-optimized version of the Qnap NAS operating system for public and private clouds.
Quantum
Jamie Lerner, Chairman, CEO
Quantum is a major provider of hardware and software for all-flash file and object storage, archival object storage, surveillance, and network video recording servers. It still offers data backup appliances and tape storage.
Qumulo
Douglas Gourlay, CEO
Qumulo creates an unstructured data platform that lets business users manage all their file and object data in any location through a single interface. The multi-protocol, cloud- native platform provides exabyte scalability. It is available for use with data center workloads as well as in the Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure clouds.
Scale Computing
Jeff Ready, Co-Founder, CEO
Scale Computing tackles data center requirements with the Scale Computing HyperCore software. HyperCore replaces virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers and shared storage with a fully integrated, self-healing platform that automatically identifies, migrate, and corrects problems in real time to help provide uptime.
Scality
Jerome Lecat, CEO
Scality brings cyber-resilient storage for AI, cloud and data protection use cases to over 500 organizations worldwide. The company offers two primary product lines. Scality Ring is a scalable, cyber-resilient object store aimed at massive and unpredictable workloads and cloud infrastructure. Artesca is a secure S3-compatible object storage software that integrates with Veeam Software for immutable data protection.
SoftIron
Phil Straw, Co-Founder, CEO
SoftIron helps businesses and government organizations build on-premises multitenant private clouds. The company’s HyperCloud architecture lets users configure compute, storage and networking as needed and provides the ability to easily assign and re-assign capacities as workloads change. SoftIron’s VM Squared offering aims to offer a virtualization alternative to VMware with security and clustering at scale.
Spectra Logic
Nathan Thompson, CEO
Spectra Logic started 40 years ago with a focus on storage tape drive technology but has since become a leader in technology for protecting and archiving data, including data management software for multi-cloud object, archiving and data migration and media management, as well as hybrid cloud storage and NAS and, of course, leading edge tape libraries and media.
StoneFly
Mo Tahmasebi, Founder, President, CEO
StoneFly was one of the original developers of the iSCSI protocol that underlined much of the growth of the storage industry for years. The company currently offers a variety of data storage, hyperconverged infrastructure and data protection technologies, working with such partners as VMware, Veeam Software, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.
StorMagic
Susan Odle, CEO
StorMagic has built its future on the edge. The company’s technology helps organizations of all sizes store, protect and manage data at and from the edge via its StorMagic SvSAN software that helps customers build hyperconverged storage with only two servers while protecting data using encryption and key management.
StorOne
Gal Naor, Co-Founder, CEO
StorOne creates the StorOne Data Storage Platform, which uses virtual storage containers and media pooling to help give users the right media for each use case. The platform also offers vRAID high-performance data protection. Included are multi-admin authorization for security, along with such high-availability services as synchronous, semi-synchronous and asynchronous replication in an any-to-any fashion.
StorPool Storage
Boyan Ivanov, Co-Founder, CEO
StorPool produces global distributed block storage technology for building public and private clouds leveraging industry-standard servers with flash or hard disk media to build a scalable shared storage system with five-9’s (99.999%) availability. The company also offers fully managed KVM cloud services, including design, deployment, ongoing operations, maintenance and updates, and continuous improvement.
Supermicro
Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman, President, CEO
Supermicro builds servers, storage systems, components and other products for sale through its own channels or to a wide range of OEM vendors. The company is closely aligned with Nvidia in the AI business and is often the first Nvidia partner to develop and deploy products based on that partnership.
Synology
James Chen, CEO
Synology specializes in storage and video surveillance technologies targeting the SMB and home user market. The company’s product line card includes a wide range of NAS and SAN appliances, backup and recovery appliances, Wi-Fi routers, cloud-based storage and data protection hardware and software, and video surveillance storage, cameras and software.
Ultihash
Tom Ludersdorf, Co-Founder, CEO
Ultihash has built a scalable object storage platform to help businesses reduce storage usage without impacting performance while helping provide a base for AI and advanced analytics. Its S3-compatible API allows for integration with third-party tools, while its Kubernetes-native design provides easy implementation in the cloud and on-premises, particularly in areas such as health care, autonomous driving and manufacturing.
Vast Data
Renen Hallak, Founder, CEO
The Vast Data Platform featuring the company’s Disaggregated Shared-Everything Architecture, or DASE. DASE is a parallel architecture aimed at providing scalable, simple, resilient and efficient storage for AI and other modern applications. Its parallel distributed systems supports the scale of the largest clouds and provides cloud-native services. Vast Data’s investors include Nvidia and Dell Technologies Capital.
Vdura
Ken Claffey, CEO
Vdura was known as Panasas until May 2024 when it transitioned its high-performance computing storage and parallel file system to a subscription-based software-only model and away from a proprietary hardware platform. The company now works with Avnet Integrated for hardware integration. The company’s Vdura Data Platform targets AI and high-performance computing workloads across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments.
VergeIO
Yan Ness, CEO
VergeOS, the flagship technology of VergeIO, is a single software stack that runs on commodity hardware to integrate hypervisor, storage and networking into a single unified hyperconverged platform. It leverages AI and machine learning to provide self-management and self-optimization. VergeOS allows IT generalists to deploy a virtual data center to provide reliable IT environments for businesses of any size.
VirtualZ
Jeanne Glass, Founder, CEO
VirtualZ is a woman-owned developer of software for working with mainframe computer data. The company’s Lozen is a no-code application that provides real-time read and write access to mainframe data for use in hybrid cloud applications without the need for manual processes. The data is then available for analytics and reporting, AI and machine learning and business applications.
Volumez
Amir Faintuch, CEO
The Volumez SaaS architecture is composable infrastructure software that separates the storage control plane, which is hosted in the Volumez cloud, from the storage data plane running in customer virtual private clouds and data centers. This helps developers more easily request file and block storage resources similar to how CPU and memory resources are accessed with Kubernetes.
WekaIO
Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder, CEO
WekaIO created the Weka Data Platform with an AI-native software-defined architecture to support modern workloads with what it calls cloud simplicity and on-premises performance. The platform is purpose-built for large-scale, data-intensive environments. Nvidia, Micron, Hitachi, Qualcomm ventures, Samsung Catalyst fund, Seagate, Western Digital and HPE Pathfinder are investors in WekaIO.
Zadara
Yoram Novick, CEO
Zadara provides AI edge clouds via a distributed cloud platform built specifically for sovereign AI applications. The company has over 500 edge cloud locations worldwide providing data privacy and security while enabling AI model training and AI real-time inference at the edge. Those fully managed clouds were designed to accommodate on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud or edge applications.
