The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2018 (So Far)

The Investments Go On

Investors are finding no lack of storage companies in which to place their bets, whether those companies are developing general-purpose storage, storage for specific applications, or storage for the cloud.

Here's a look at 10 independent startup storage developers that only recently either came out of stealth or introduced their first products.

(For more on the biggest news of 2018, check out "CRN's Tech Midyear In Review.")

Alluxio

Founder: Haoyuan Li

Alluxio was formed as Tachyon at the University of California Berkeley's AMPLab. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company's technology provides global access to enterprise data on premises, in the cloud, or both. It manages communications between applications and either file or object storage, and treats file data as object storage and vice versa. Alluxio clusters act as a cache for data in connected storage systems.

Attala Systems

President, CTO: Sujith Arramreddy

Attala, San Jose, Calif., is the developer of what it calls composable storage infrastructure based on a scale-out fabric that uses standard Ethernet networks to interconnect multiple servers and storage nodes. The fabric dynamically attaches NVMe volumes from serverless storage nodes to servers, virtual machines, or containers where the applications reside with latencies as low as 15 microseconds.

Cloud Daddy

Founder, CEO: Joe Merces

Princeton, N.J.-based Cloud Daddy in late June entered the storage market with Secure Backup, which combines AWS-native backup and disaster recovery, security, and infrastructure management into a single offering. Secure Backup, available in versions ranging from free to enterprise-class, provides a full range of multitenant data protection and recovery capabilities along with full security capabilities including instance firewall and rules and security group management.

HYCU

CEO: Simon Taylor

HYCU, pronounced "haiku," is the Boston-based developer of data protection technology originally developed specifically for hyper-converged infrastructure environments. The company early this year was spun out of Netherlands-based Comtrade Software. HYCU's data protection technology was originally developed for San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix's hyper-converged infrastructure platform, but now also works with Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware's ESX hypervisor.

Liqid

Co-Founder, CEO: Sumit Puri

The Liqid Composable technology from Broomfield, Colo.-based Liqid leverages industry-standard compute, networking, storage and GPU components to deliver a scalable architecture built from pools of disaggregated resources. These resources can be disaggregated, pooled, orchestrated, and repurposed across PCIe fabric on demand at the bare-metal level with sub-microsecond latencies.

Morro Data

Founder, CEO: Paul Tien

Fremont, Calif.-based Morro Data's CloudNAS hybrid cloud file services works from single devices to multisite enterprises to provide primary and archive storage and instant file sync and share and collaboration across multiple sites. It combines fast file access and the NAS SMB interface of the company's CacheDrive to treat cloud-based storage as if it were a local NAS file server.

OpenIO

CEO: Laurent Denel

OpenIO develops technology to transform commodity servers into large object storage and compute pools. The San Francisco-based company's OpenIO SDS software can run on one CPU core and 512 MB of RAM, making it available on almost any hardware. The same software can be installed in environments ranging from remote embedded devices to data centers to store, protect, process and serve nearly any object data.

RStor

Founder, CEO: Giovanni Coglitore

RStor, Saratoga, Calif., this year introduced the RStor Multicloud Platform that aggregates resources from private data centers and public clouds into a single fabric. Data can quickly be moved to the compute resources and vice versa. RStor also introduced Data Lake, an enterprise storage service at the edge of the cloud to help businesses make their data securely accessible to on-premises IT, public clouds and supercomputing centers.

Storbyte

CEO: Steve Groenke

Flash storage technology developer Storbyte in April exited stealth mode with the introduction of new flash storage arrays that offer enterprise-level performance using modular flash memory combined with patented proprietary technology it promises will significantly increase the lifespan of that memory. The Washington, D.C.-based company's all-flash arrays feature its Eco-Flash all-flash storage modules designed to maintain performance over time.

Termaxia

CEO: Changbin Liu

Termaxia develops exabyte-scale high-performance big data storage systems for both object data with APIs for Amazon S3 and OpenStack and file data with APIs for POSIX, NFS and Hadoop. The Philadelphia-based company says that compared with conventional systems, its platform uses less than one-fifth the power and requires less than half the hardware, yet offers drop-in deployment and easy management and monitoring.