Emerging Vendors 2017: 20 Data Center Startups You Need To Know
The Next Generation Of Data Center Providers
Despite the widespread adoption of cloud computing and mobile devices, data centers remain at the heart of many enterprise IT operations. And with the rapid pace of IT change showing no signs of slowing in 2017, finding the right experts to help build and operate data centers is crucial.
That means looking beyond the obvious names in infrastructure to find the niche startups that can satisfy a variety of customer needs, ranging from tools for monitoring system performance and managing corporate data, to system and application integration software, to advanced application development technologies.
As part of CRN's 2017 Emerging Vendors list, here are 20 hot data center upstarts, all founded after 2011, that solution providers should be aware of.
365 Data Centers
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Bob DeSantis, CEO
365 Data Centers operates collocation facilities in New York City, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Nashville and Tampa. The company offers 24/7 monitoring, as well as a 100 percent uptime SLA.
Aligned Energy
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Jakob Carnemark, CEO and Founder
Aligned Energy operates a 300,000-square-foot facility in Dallas and a 550,000-square-foot facility in Phoenix. The company's data centers offer high power densities from 1-50kW per rack. Using "build-to-scale" services, Aligned helps customers with facility design, construction and retrofitting.
Avi Networks
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Amit Pandey, CEO
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Avi offers software load-balancing solutions for any cloud, as well as load balancing for SDN, load balancing as-a-service for OpenStack, and container services.
Catalogic Software
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Ken Barth, CEO
Catalogic Software ECX provides software-only automation of storage array copy processes (snapshots, replication, clones) to simplify protection and recovery as well as test-dev/DevOps for mission-critical enterprise applications (Oracle, SQL Server, Epic EHR, SAP HANA). ECX supports both physical and virtual servers across multiple OSs (Windows, Linux, AIX).
CoreOS
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Alex Polvi, CEO
CoreOS is an open source container software firm focused on internet security and reliability through its open source operating system and other products.
Datera
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Marc Fleischmann, CEO and Founder
Datera offers data management software for virtualization, databases and containers with an eye toward rapid scaling and infrastructure automation.
Diamanti
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Jeffrey Chou, CEO and Founder
Diamanti markets an appliance for container applications that the company says blends the simplicity of hyper-convergence with the performance of Docker containers.
DriveScale
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Gene Banman, CEO
DriveScale provides data center orchestration software for big data applications. The DriveScale System enables data center administrators to manage compute and storage resources as separate pools, and bind them together in any ratio required.
Ebullient
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Tim Shedd, CEO and Co-Founder
Ebullient develops liquid cooling systems for Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers, enterprise data centers, research computing and other applications.
Elastifile
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Amir Aharoni, CEO and Co-Founder
Elastifile software unifies enterprise data within a single global name space and supports cost-optimized deployment on any standard server or cloud instance. The company also provides data management, including compression and deduplication, plus subscription pricing.
HashiCorp
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Dave McJannet, CEO
HashiCorp's software, all of which is developed using open source technology, form tools that let businesses work across all manner of physical, virtual, container, and cloud environments. Its Consul Enterprise application connects and configures applications across distributed infrastructures, while others manage deployment, security and provisioning.
Kaleao
Founded: 2015
Top Executive: Giampietro Tecchiolli, CEO
Kaleao develops low-energy-consumption converged hardware and software systems aimed at reducing costs and increasing operational efficiency for enterprise data centers, cloud services providers, web organizations, web services and content providers. The company's KMAX offerings are compatible with Linux-based applications on ARM platforms, and natively support Open Stack.
Komprise
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Kumar Goswami, CEO
Komprise provides applications to analyze and manage data across an entire storage infrastructure to provide visibility into storage use and growth and return on investment, and then move, copy, and manage on-premises and cloud data based on business objectives, all with no agents or changes to the hot data path.
Megaport
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Vincent English, CEO and Director
The software-defined networking-based Megaport fabric provides enterprises with secure, dedicated connections via a 1-Gbit or 10-Gbit interface to connect to any carrier, service provider, or major cloud provider within minutes from any Megaport location. Megaport integrates into multi-clout hosted environments, and allows public cloud bursting.
Mesosphere
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Florian Leibert, CEO and Co-Founder
The Mesosphere Enterprise DC/OS provides a platform for elastically running containerized applications and data services in production. It provides the full range of services to manage and run those apps in on-premises data center and multi-cloud environments, including networking and storage management, security, and multi-tenancy.
NodeWeaver
Founded: 2012
Top Executive: Stefano Massarotti, CEO and Co-Founder
NodeWeaver breaks virtual machine data into "chunks," or atomic components of a file, which are replicated and managed across multiple media types including SSDs and hard drives. Its file system provides a trail of changes to data to allow reconstruction of the data, even after a total power failure.
Stratoscale
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Ariel Maislos, CEO and Founder
Stratoscale's cloud data center software, Stratoscale Symphony, helps businesses build an application-centric and service-driven AWS region within their enterprise data centers, including compute, object and block storage, networking, an application catalog, identity and access management, and a variety of other services.
TSO Logic
Founded: 2013
Top Executive: Aaron Rallo, CEO and Founder
TSO Logic develops an integrated, open platform software to optimize application delivery in any data center environment. That software offers visibility into IT operations from the stack to the rack, along with actionable analytics and automated controls for improving performance.
Vapor IO
Founded: 2015
Top Executive: Cole Crawford, CEO
Vapor IO develops Vapor Edge, an integrated platform that provides intelligent hybrid and edge data center capabilities to help reduce capex and opex costs when running modern applications in data-driven data centers. Vapor Edge puts cloud capabilities at the edge of the network to increase performance and reduce latencies.
WeaveWorks
Founded: 2014
Top Executive: Alexis Richardson, CEO
WeaveWorks is the developer of Weave Cloud, a software-as-a-service that aims to simplify deployment, monitoring, and management for containers and microservices. Weave Cloud extends and complements popular orchestrators, and helps developers and DevOps to provide faster deployments, insightful monitoring, visualization, and networking.