The 10 Hottest Storage Startups Of 2020 (So Far)

CRN looks at 10 data storage startups that made recent headlines as they came out of stealth or unveiled their first cloud storage, disaster recovery, and other innovations.

Data Storage Startups: No Letup In Innovation

The storage industry is constantly reinventing itself. Not long ago, all-flash storage was the latest technology for improving storage performance, and discussions became heated over whether the cloud would take over the role of managing data from storage vendors and how those vendors would survive the change.

Today, those conversations seem quaint as the storage industry looks for ever better ways to manage and protect data while making data work whether it is on-premises or in the cloud. That calls for new technologies to manage data migration, ensure persistent data in containers is protected, and data is available from anywhere or is sealed within national borders.

It is with this in mind that CRN is built this list of hot storage startups tacking the issues around data from a variety of angles from basic hardware components to the most sophisticated cloud capabilities.

Turn the page for a look at 10 independent startup storage developers that only recently either came out of stealth or introduced their first products.

For more of the biggest startups, products and news stories of 2020, click here.

Cloud Daddy

President, Chief Product Officer, Co-founder: Joe Merces

Cloud Daddy was founded specifically to provide secure backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services environments, and is an Amazon Technology Partner. The Princeton, N.J.-based company provides cloud-native capabilities including A.I. alerting, anti-malware and anti-ransomware intelligent threat detection, and infrastructure management to help AWS clients of any size protect and manage data across public, private, government, and hybrid clouds. Its multi-layer backup and disaster recovery capabilities protect data in AWS EC2, EBS, RDS databases, DynamoDB, and Aurora RedShift clusters with cross-region encryption, file-level recovery, and cost-aware backup and replication.

GigaSpaces

CEO: Adi Paz

GigaSpaces develops high-performance in-memory computing platforms for real-time insight for such applications as transactional processing. New York-based GigaSpaces lets enterprises operationalize machine learning and transactional processing in order to access real-time insights on fast and historical data and quickly act upon those insights. GigaSpaces' always-on platform for are targeted at mission-critical applications across cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments.

InCountry

CEO and Founder: Peter Yared

InCountry provides what it terms data residence-as-a-service which allows businesses to run best-of-breed SaaS applications with data residency in over 80 countries. The San Francisco-based company's technology allows data to be stored in country of origin or citizenship with end-to-end compliance and audit support with data residency for regulation in over 80 countries with encryption in both single-tenant and multi-tenant environments.

JetStream Software

CEO and Co-founder: Tom Critser

The JetStream Software technology platform includes VMware-certified solutions for migrating and protecting virtual machines. The San Jose, Calif.-based company's software is integrated with vSphere through standard VMware APIs and managed through vCenter and vSphere SPBM, and is compatible with any underlying storage infrastructure. JetStream Migrate software provides efficient cloud migration with no interruption to runtime operations, while JetStream DR provides enterprise-grade disaster recovery, business continuity, and continuous data protection as a cloud-based service.

Kasten

CEO and Founder: Niraj Tolia

Kasten is the Los Altos, Calif.-based developer of the Kasten K10 data management platform purpose-built for Kubernetes to give enterprises a scalable and secure system for data backups and restores, disaster recovery, and mobility. K10 features auto application discovery to discover all applications and associated artifacts that might need protection, policy-driven automation for setting up custom and default policies to meet data management requirements, and compliance monitoring to check the up-to-date protection status of all applications.

Lightbits Labs

CEO and Co-founder: Eran Kirzner

Lightbits Labs develop software-defined storage technology for developing target-side NVMe/TCP clustered storage solutions on any commodity server. The San Jose, Calif.-based company's technology allows for composable storage to help simplify deployment, and provides for high-performance disaggregation of storage from the compute. The software includes advanced flash management technology to extend SSD lifetime along with persistent storage for container load-balancing.

MemVerge

CEO: Charles Fan

MemVerge was founded shortly after Intel released its first Optane SSDs to develop a new software stack to take advantage of that new hardware. Milpitas, Calif.-based MemVerge's Big Memory Software works with the Optane persistent memory to scale memory out to petabytes in order to separate applications requiring the highest performance from traditional data storage to provide fast data services including snapshot, replication, and data recovery and eliminate the performance penalty of memory swapping.

NVISNx

CEO: Glen Day

NVISNx helps businesses visually profile their data so they can better protect their most valuable digital assets and dispose of data that may be toxic or has no value. The Playa Vista, Calif.-based company's technology includes a visual analytics engine that provides meaningful and actionable intelligence to business, privacy, and security professionals looking to make informed decisions on what data to protect and what data to delete.

Stellus

CEO and President: Jeff Treuhaft

Stellus is the developer of the Stellus Data Platform which uses the company's key-value over fabrics technology to manage unstructured data. The San Jose, Calif.-based company's Stellus Data Platform helps reduce or eliminate the need for file and block conversions, global data mapping, and global cache management to deliver consistent and fast performance. The company claims its systems provide up to 80 GBs per second of read throughput with raw capacity of up to 1.475 petabytes, all with the ability to independently scale throughput and capacity as required.

StorageOS

CEO, CTO, and Founder: Alex Chircop

StorageOS is the developer of a cloud-native storage technology that provides persistent container storage for clients' stateful applications in production. The London-based company's StorageOS technology delivers rapid failover, replication, in-memory cache, data reduction with access controls, and a rules engine. When deployed anywhere in a single container, StorageOS dynamically provisions highly available persistent volumes. StorageOS is targeted at developers, infrastructure managers, and platform architects.