10 Storage Products That Are Tearing Up The Rule Book

These 10 startups have introduced their first hardware, software and cloud products, highlighting new ways to tackle a range of storage issues.

For a startup in any industry, getting that first product or service into the hands of potential customers is a real milestone. A lot of work--and a lot of sweat and a lot of investors’ money--has gone into taking an idea to an actual product or service. Of course, after that is when the real work begins as the startups then have to prove they have the staying power to either succeed on their own or get acquired.

For startups in the storage industry, hitting that milestone requires overcoming a number of unique challenges, not the least of which is finding new innovative ways to store, protect, manage, access, and archive data. Yet storage startups have to do this in an environment filled with innovation, leaving little room for newcomers to shine.

And yet they continue to shine, as shown by this look at the first storage hardware, software, and services offerings from a new cadre of startups, all of which were released in the last year or so. How many of these offerings will take their developers to success? Time will tell.

Calamu

Calamu last year exited stealth with a seed round of funding worth $2.4 million, including funding from Dell Technologies' venture capital arm. The Clinton, N.J.- based company is offering Calamu Protect, a technology it said automatically fragments data across separate storage locations while at rest to nullify the impact of a data breach or ransomware attack. The data fragments, useless on their own, are also encrypted to prevent unauthorized access.

Cubbit

Cubbit, Bologna, Italy, last year started bringing its Cubbit Cell device to market. User’s data is fragmented into shards over multiple Cells set up by other users and encrypted using AES 256 security with encryption keys available only to the user. Network self-healing technology to restore shards if a certain number of hosting peers go off-line. Cubbit charges a one-time fee for its technology rather than a subscription.

Filebase

Boston-based Filebase develops the Filebase AWS S3-compatible object storage platform. The platform’s API allows it to work with any AWS S3 tools to store and manage three redundant copies of objects across thousands of availability zones. There are no charges for ingress or API requests, and outbound data transfers are charged on a per-GB basis. A planned private cloud offering is slated to let customers deploy on-premises, scalable object storage.

Firebolt

Wilmington, Del-based Firebolt, which in June raised a $127-million round of funding, develops a scalable Data Warehouse as a Service to give business users quick access to data. The service decouples storage and compute to improve granular elasticity and seamless scaling up or down of shared Amazon S3-compatible storage, with clusters built with massive parallel processing to increase performance as scale grows.

Graid Technology

Graid Technology, Santa Clara, Calif., developed and is shipping what it calls the world’s first NVMeoF (NVMe over Fabric) RAID card that delivers full SSD performance. The company’s SupremeRAID overcomes traditional RAID card performance bottlenecks by connecting the SSDs directly via NVMeoF, letting a single card deliver 16 million IOPS and 110 Gbytes per second of throughput. The company is partnering with Gigabyte, Kioxia, AMD, and Seagate to bring the technology to enterprise data center customers.

InCountry

San Francisco-based InCountry’s new platform allows businesses to transform existing SaaS applications like Salesforce or ServiceNow to ensure data is stored and protected in a way that is compliant based on where it is sold. Its technology lets customers pick which data to localize without requiring SaaS vendors to make any changes. The company also offers single-tenant hosting of data in each country to isolate a customer‘s data from other network traffic.

Iodyne

Mill Vallely, Calif.-based Iodyne late 2021 introduced its new Pro Data, a high-performance storage system that combines 12 NVMe SSDs with up to 24 terabytes of capacity with the company’s proprietary RAID and encryption technology to allow up to four users to access data that is securely stored on-premises. The Pro Data is built around thunderbolt so that up to six devices can be daisy-chained for up to 576 terabytes of capacity.

Meroxa

San Francisco-based Meroxa early 2021 released its first product, a real-time data orchestration platform that provides tool to quickly build real-time infrastructures. The Meroxa Platform as a Service Data is targeted at helping data teams quickly build infrastructures and focus more in projects. The platform includes a machine learning rules engine, a change data capture service, a dashboard for automating actions, and an auto-generated API to shorten configuration time.

Model9

Model9 is a New York-based developer of software that unlocks mainframe-formatted data to make it usable in private and public cloud in lieu of virtual tape hardware or software. Model9 partners with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM to help businesses with real-time and historical business data take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business intelligence capabilities.

Tsecond

San Jose, Calif.-based storage startup Tsecond in October released its first product, called the BRYCK, a portable and rugged device which features high-speed storage and recovery of up to a full petabyte of data. Designed for capturing, processing, moving, and storing up to a petabyte of data, the BRYCK is available with capacities of 128 TBs, 256 TBs, 512 TBs, and 1 petabyte.