10 Data Storage Companies to Watch

Innovative start-ups that target flash drives, cloud storage, and disaster recovery.

By Jon Brodkin
Thu, July 31, 2008

Network World — From de-duplication and disaster recovery to flash drives and cloud storage, there's a ton of innovation in the storage market. After looking at companies in stealth mode and those that released their first products within the past year, we identified 10 storage start-ups worth watching. (Compare storage products.)

Here's a look at each vendor:

MORE ON CIO.com

Cloud Computing: Tales from the Front

Beyond Disaster Recovery: Intelligent Automation and Business Continuity

How One Company Used Virtualization to Lower the Cost of Disaster Recovery

Understanding Data Destruction: What the CIO Needs to Know.

Company name: Atrato
Founded: April 2004
Location: Westminster, Colo.
What does the company offer? A mix of hardware and software called the V1000 that helps alleviate the I/O bottleneck between storage and servers to improve access to data. Atrato, which exited stealth mode in February, says its technology delivers up to 10,000 input/output operations per second while reducing the rack space and cooling requirements of a typical data center.
Why is it worth watching? Offers fast, high-density storage that should prove useful for high-performance computing and delivery of digital entertainment.
How did the company get its start? Co-founders Dan McCormick and Jonathan Hall, both veterans of XIOtech, decided they could improve the performance, cost-effectiveness and security of data delivered at high speeds for customers dealing with streaming content, high-performance computing and enterprise technology.
How did the company get its name? Atrato is named after the Rio Atrato in Colombia, the fastest-flowing river on Earth.
CEO and background: McCormick spent almost six years at XIOtech, including a role as vice president of marketing.
Funding: $18 million from storage industry veterans such as Jesse Aweida, founder and former CEO of StorageTek, and Tom Porter, a former IBM storage executive who was also CTO of Seagate.
Who's using the product? Dozens of customers, including MusicGiants and SRC Computers.

Company name: 4Blox
Founded: April 2005
Location: San Jose
What does the company offer? 4Mezzo, software that improves performance of iSCSI-based storage-area networks by optimizing communication between iSCSI and TCP protocols. 4Blox's tagline asks IT shops "are your iSCSI solutions ready for 10GbE?"
Why is it worth watching? 4Mezzo's technology that reduces the CPU processing power demanded by the iSCSI protocol, which is becoming much more popular. "4Blox has developed a unique software-based approach to performance that sets it apart from current hardware-based iSCSI offload and acceleration products," Scott Caruso of Flywheel Ventures said after investing in 4Blox.
How did the company get its start? Founders Sai Narasimhamurthy and Joseph Hui developed the technology at Arizona State University, where Narasimhamurthy was a doctoral student and Hui was his professor. ASU still owns the company's intellectual property.
How did the company get its name? The founders saw the number 4 everywhere: Their technology has four core components, the first component has four building blocks, and iSCSI is a Layer 4 transport protocol. ISCSI itself enables block-level storage, explaining the "blox" portion of the name.
CEO and background: Dan Munro began his career as a software engineer but more recently became a consultant working with early-stage software companies to accelerate their growth or help them be acquired.
Funding: An undisclosed amount from angel investors and the venture capital firm Flywheel Ventures.
Who's using the product? 4Blox technology is still in beta with OEM customers, including several "large marquee storage vendors," the company says.

1 2 3 4 5 next page »

You are here: Technology Topics » Architecture » Feature

Most Recent Architecture Stories

White Papers »

Microsoft Volume Licensing Comparison - Small/Med. Business

This quick-reference document lets small and medium organizations (i.e. those with five or more devices) to easily compare the available Microsoft Volume Licensing programs to create a simple, cost-effective and flexible way to benefit from volume licensing.

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Best Practices in Data Protection - Executive Summary

This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter