If you think about it, the amount of content on the web has greatly increased over the years as more and more companies, businesses and individuals move to store all of their data virtually. Companies opt to go paperless and the content on the web grows exponentially, as Network World reports. Naturally then, the storage needs of companies and businesses have increased as well.
That’s where the new storage startups come into play. It used to be that a terabytes, which is 1,000 gigabytes, was considered a large amount of space. Now, with all of the content that is being stored virtually, enterprises are beginning to think in terms of petabytes, which is 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes. As Network World states, with that amount of information and data being stored it’s becoming expensive and difficult to retrieve that data on a timely basis once stored. In order to aid this issue, companies have invested a large amount of money in “technologies such as virtualization and cloud storage that can help them simplify their overall IT architecture, lower their costs and run their storage operations more efficiently.” It is the storage startups that possess this technology and they are beginning to grow and expand because of it.
“There’s not enough physical capacity for the amount of data that’s being generated,” says John Mascarenas, the investment director for Intel Capital in Network World. “It continues to move past the place where we can keep building physical storage.” Mascarenas says the result of this has been a large amount of innovation in a space that was not previously thought of as a cutting-edge industry. As Network World reports, “according to analysis from Strategic Advisory Services International LLC, venture funding for storage companies totaled $458 million through the first three quarters of 2011, or roughly 42.4% more than the $321.5 million in venture funding the storage industry received in the first three quarters of 2010 and more than double the $213.7 million in venture funding storage startups received through the first three quarters of 2009.” That shows how greatly the field is growing and how much companies are investing in storage technology and the startups that utilize it.
Below are three of the top seven storage startups in the field that are worth keeping an eye on. It is likely that as more companies look towards cloud storage, these startups will come out on top.
Amplidata
Located in Belgium, this startup was founded in 2009 and focuses its energy on storage for large unstructured data. “CEO and co-founder Wim De Wispelaere specialized in deduplication and disk backup technologies while working as a director of product management at Symantec.” The company’s major specialization is helping enterprises store large petabyte-scale masses of unstructured data. “Amplidata says that it’s able to store massive amounts of data that can be quickly recalled by using its patent-pending BitSpread Codec algorithms to eliminate redundant data,” as noted in Network World.
Pure Storage
Located in Mountain View, this startup was also founded in 2009 and focuses its energy on all-flash storage. “Pure Storage is still convinced that it can deliver an all-flash storage system that can distribute storage space at a price that’s competitive with standard disk solutions. Similar to Amplidata, Pure Storage uses data-reduction algorithms that compress and de-duplicate redundant data. Pure Storage CEO Dietzen says that eliminating redundant data allows Pure Storage to reduce the total amount of data stored by five to 20 times.”
“Let’s say that we have 38TB of virtual machines running and what actually gets stored is 2.5TB,” Dietzen says in the article. “We’re storing less data than competing systems around the world.”
NexGen Storage
Founded in 2010 and located in Louisville, Colorado this storage startup focuses on SSD optimization. NexGen Vice President of Marketing Chris McCall says that companies have a choice when it comes to data storage. They can have more speed or more capacity ie., faster retrieval with some issues or bottlenecking, or more space with less speed. As stated in the article, “The company says that its PCIe-based offering can deliver “22 times more I/O” than standard SSDs that are located behind storage controllers and are 43% less expensive than SSDs behind storage controllers. Since the architecture delivers the speed of SSDs without the capacity constraints, McCall says that it can give users the ability to provision performance in much the same way that they’ve typically provisioned capacity. This, in turn, lets users maintain quality of service on their mission-critical data volumes “even during system events that impact performance,” the company says.”
To see the other storage startups that are booming, visit Network World’s article. You can also get a more in-depth description of what the startups offer and optimize for.
SOURCE: Network World
IMAGE: A petabyte term photo courtesy of Passive Pundits
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