The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2021

CRN is highlighting 10 data storage startups that made headlines in the last year with the unveiling of their first storage products aimed at improving data storage, data protection, and/or data migration, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or some hybrid combination.

Storing, Sharing, And Managing Data: The Evolution Continues

See the latest entry: The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2022

When it comes to storing, protecting, managing, migrating, and manipulating data, regardless of whether it‘s on-premises, in the cloud, or both, there is no lack of new data storage companies entering the market. The underlying trends related to storage continue to change, but the ability for inventors and investors to come up with new ways to work with data doesn’t.

Data storage is a fast-moving industry, and it falls on storage startups to find new ways to advance the technology. Some will become successful on their own, some will be acquired by larger companies to make the technology part of a greater whole, and yes, some will fail. But all will leave their mark in the future of storage.

That future is constantly changing. CRN keeps a close watch on the key emerging data storage trends, including the fact that businesses are now more focused on how data impacts their top and bottom lines and how it advances their mission, and increasingly less on how or where or on which brand the data is stored.

The following 10 data storage startups are working on the leading edge of helping customers advance their missions. Click through the slideshow to learn more about them.

22dot6

Diamond Lauffin, CEO and founder

22dot6 in May exited stealth with a software-defined storage technology it claims works with any data on any hardware or cloud. The Westlake Village, Calif.-based company, founded by long-term storage and channel innovator Diamond Lauffin, who previously co-founded Nexsan, developed its Valence technology to abstract storage resources regardless of what storage hardware or clouds the data resides on to bridge between virtualization, hardware abstraction, data services, and storage accessibility. The software-defined Valence is available as software to install on customers’ own hardware, or as a complete hardware appliance. The company in November extended its TASS (Transcendent Abstractive Storage System) with point-and-click private cloud set-up and hybrid cloud spanning.

Calamu

Paul Lewis, CEO

Calamu in April exited stealth with a seed round of funding worth $2.4 million and a plan to bring technology to let data automatically self-heal in the event of a data breach or ransomware attack. Dell Technologies' venture capital arm in June was revealed to be one of the see investors. The company’s Calamu Protect scalable automated date protection platform works by encrypting data, dividing it into fragments that themselves are useless, and then scattering those fragments to multiple storage locations. The Clinton, N.J.-based company claims that if one storage location is compromised, the data can be instantly restored to full resilience using redundant fragments.

Cubbit

Stefano Onofri, CEO and co-founder

Cubbit is building what the Bologna, Italy-based company calls a 100 percent private, secure, and green cloud storage technology. Cubbit makes use of unused internet and storage resources in homes and businesses to form a distributed cloud powered by collective intelligence. The company‘s proprietary software transforms a user’s device, including servers, computers, routers, IoT devices, and more, into a Cubbit network node. Users can also use a proprietary Cubbit Cell plug and play device to access the service. Data stored in Cubbit’s distributed cloud is split into redundant chunks, encrypted, and optimally deployed across the network, and is encrypted so that no unauthorized people, including Cubbit itself, can access the contents.

Filebase

Joshua Noble, CEO and co-founder

Boston-based Filebase develops a modern AWS S3-compatible object storage platform. The platform’s API allows it to work with any tools that use AWS S3, but requires no charges for ingress or API requests, although extra outbound data transfers are charged on a per-gigabyte basis. It allows objects to be redundantly stored across thousands of availability zones worldwide, and includes a proprietary edge caching technology to increase data throughput and cut data ingress and egress response times. The company is planning a private cloud offering where scalable object storage can be deployed on a customer‘s own servers.

Firebolt

Eldad Farkash, CEO and co-founder

Firebolt develops data warehouse-as-a-service to give business users quick access to data. The Wilmington, Del.-based company in June raised a $127 million round of funding, bringing it total funding to $165 million. It has created what it calls the world’s most powerful cloud data warehouse and is making it available as a service for big data analytics experts. Firebolt decouples storage and compute to improve granular elasticity and seamless scaling up or down of compute nodes in a shared-nothing architecture, all while taking advantage of shared S3 storage. The technology provides high performance at any scale.

Graid Technology

Leander Yu, CEO

Graid Technology develops what the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company terms the world’s first NVMeoF (NVMe over Fabric) RAID card that delivers 100 percent of available SSD performance. Unlike traditional RAID cards, which require disks to be connected directly to the card, the Graid SupremeRAID card protects direct-attached SSDs as well as SSDs connected via NVMeoF while allowing users to receive 100 percent of available SSD performance. One SupremeRAID card can deliver 6 million IOPS and 25 Gbytes per second of throughput, the company said. Gigabyte and Kioxia are among the first industry companies to offer the card to enterprise data center customers.

InCountry

Peter Yared, CEO and founder

San Francisco-based InCountry transforms applications to ensure local compliance and security of the data based on where it is stored. This allows businesses to continue using their existing SaaS products without worrying about data residency compliance. The InCountry technology lets customers pick which data to localize without the need to require the SaaS vendor 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.

Meroxa

DeVaris Brown, CEO and co-founder

Meroxa is a San Francisco-based developer of a real-time data orchestration platform that provides tool to quickly build real-time infrastructures. Data teams can use Meroxa to do such tasks as real-time data warehouse synchronization for data analytics and visualizations, archiving of raw records into data lakes, processing data in real-time so it quickly reaches its destination in the required format, and develop custom data services. The company in April unveiled a $15 million Series A round of funding. On the product side, August saw it release a Microsoft SQL Server connector beta to use SQL as a source for real-time data streams.

Model9

Gil Peleg, CEO

Model9 develops software that unlocks mainframe-formatted data to make it usable in private and public cloud in place of virtual tape hardware software. The New York-based company is an AWS advanced technology partner, a Microsoft Azure IP co-sell partner, and an IBM business partner, and partners with any vendor of public or private clouds to provide a wide range of connectivity options for object storage and data management. It works with both real-time and historical business data to help businesses take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business intelligence capabilities. And as of August, the company actually owns an IBM z15 mainframe computer.

Tsecond

Sahil Chawla, CEO and co-founder

Storage startup Tsecond develops technology for capturing, processing, moving, and storing up to a petabyte of data. The San Jose, Calif.-based company 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. It is available with capacities of 128 TBs, 256 TBs, 512 TBs, and 1 petabyte. Future versions include models with smaller form factors, models with larger capacities, and optimization for specific services including machine learning and analytics.