10 Storage Startups Flexing Their Muscles With New Takes On Technology

CRN highlights 10 new offerings have the potential to reshape the storage landscape.

Trying To Crawl Above Of The Noise

Being an IT industry startup is not easy. In addition to the scramble for funding, finding the right people, and developing technology, they need to get visibility in order to stand out through all the noise. This is especially true in the storage industry where startups come and go on a regular basis.

For storage vendor startups, standing out from the crowd can be extra difficult given that they are banking on convincing channel partners and end users to put that most precious of all commodities, a company's data, in their hands and trust them to protect that data, keep it out of the wrong hands, and find value from it.

This year's Tech 10 Storage feature highlights 10 startups, all of whom have come to market in only the last year. These companies are hoping to grab attention with new storage innovations they hope will help clients and partners solve business issues while helping themselves stand out from the crowd.

Aparavi File Product & Insight

Aparavi in October unveiled its Aparavi File Protect & Insight, or FPI, software targeting data backup and long-term retention in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. FPI addresses unstructured data, including backing up files from central storage devices and endpoints to any or multiple cloud destinations. It includes Aparavi Data Awareness, which gives customers intelligence and insight to help with security, search and access.

Cloud Daddy Secure Backup V.1.6

Version 1.6 of Cloud Daddy Secure Backup (CDSB), which provides Amazon Web Services-native data protection, now gives customers the ability to enable automatic updates in the CDSB settings. For customers on the AWS GovCloud Regions, CDSB now supports DynamoDB backups, and provides cost estimates for backup jobs. CDSP also provides RESTful API documentation, and now offers reports for multiple tenants for MSPs.

Clumio Enterprise Backup As A Service For AWS

Enterprise Backup-as-a-Service developer Clumio, which in August came out of stealth, late last year introduced the Clumio Enterprise Backup as a Service for AWS Native Services. With this enterprise-focused SaaS offering, Clumio is consolidating the protection of data centers, remote sites, and AWS native services with no hardware or software to size, configure, manage or purchase.

FileShadow Publish: File Sharing Via Cloud

FileShadow, which develops a service to aggregate files from multiple cloud and hardware sources into a single cloud vault, in November unveiled FileShadow Publish, which provides users with the ability to publish collections of files from their vault via shareable links to a file, folder or collection. It also prevents unauthorized redistribution of shared files.

Formulus Black: Memory-Based Storage For Packet

Formulus Black, developer of the Forsa software for in-memory compute that turns server memory into high-performance storage, worked with Intel to develop high-performance persistent memory-powered infrastructure solutions for test, validation and optimization on Packet’s cloud platform. The technology combines Forsa with Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory to decrease CPU usage and cut latency under maximum load conditions.

HYCU: Backup, Recovery For Google

Data protection software developer HYCU in November enhanced its SaaS offering to make it work natively on the Google Cloud Platform. The HYCU Backup as a Service for GCP features optimized cloud-native incremental backups and archives for GCP workloads, dynamic scaling of capacity, compatibility with enterprise applications like SAP HANA, flexible pricing and enhanced reporting.

Liqid ‘Honey Badger’ NVME

Liqid, which develops a composable infrastructure platform, in August introduced its Liqid Element LQD4500 PCIe add-in card it called “Honey Badger.” The card is a full-height, full-length PCIe card that includes up to 32 TB of NVMe storage with up to 4 million IOPS of random performance, over 24 GBps of throughput, and latency of 20 microseconds, the company said.

Morro Data CloudNAS 4.2

Morro Data CloudNAS combines the company’s cloud-based global file system and its cloud gateway to accelerate file access and synchronization among multiple sites. Its new version 4.2 includes the ability to automatically move data from on-premises to the cloud, detailed session and event logging, synchronization with Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint files, and enhanced Azure Active Directory management.

Pavilion Data Systems V.2.2

Pavilion Data Systems, a developer of NVMe over Fabric, or NVMe-oF, technology, in May unveiled version 2.2 of its Pavilion Data platform with write performance to up to 90 GBps and write latency as low as 40 microseconds using RAID-6. It also offers SWARM recovery for fast RAID rebuilds, and includes a suite of data management capabilities including thin provisioning, snapshots and data at rest encryption.

Vast Data Container Storage Interface

Vast Data in January started shipping its Container Storage Interface, or CSI, which the company said lets users programmatically deploy and manage storage services for CSI-compliant container platforms including Kubernetes and Red Hat Open Shift. Customers using Vast Data’s CSI driver and its Universal Storage platform can stream data to containers at up to 9 GBps, while offering multitenant quality of service.