Top 10 Data Storage Startups 2020

Software Focus presents a comprehensive list of 10 best storage startups that have hogged headlines in top-tier media over 2020 as they emerged from a stealth mode or revealed their innovative solutions for cloud storage, data migration, and disaster recovery.

JetStream Software

CEO and Co-Founder: Tom Critser

JetStream Software was founded as FlashSoft Software and then acquired by SanDisk and Western Digital, which spun it off into a separate company to focus on disaster recovery and workload migration technologies for cloud service providers. The San Jose, California-based software is integrated with VMware vSphere through standard VMware APIs and managed through vCenter and vSphere SPBM, and is compatible with any underlying storage infrastructure.

JetStream Software enables efficient, non-interruptive cloud migration, while JetStream DR delivers enterprise-grade disaster recovery, business continuity, and continuous data protection as a cloud service.

Lightbits Labs

CEO and Co-Founder: Eran Kirzner

Lightbits Labs develops software-defined storage technology to develop clustered NVMe / TCP storage solutions on any standard server. The technology from this San Jose, California-based company enables composable storage to simplify deployment and provides high-performance partitioning of storage and compute resources.

The company’s software includes advanced flash management technology to extend SSD lifespan, as well as persistent storage for container load balancing.

Intel invested an undisclosed amount in Lightbits Labs in September 2020, and the two are now working together to develop cutting-edge disaggregated storage solutions.

MemVerge

CEO: Charles Fan

MemVerge is another data storage startup based in San Jose, California. It was founded shortly after Intel released its first Optane SSDs to develop a new software stack to take advantage of the new storage technology. MemVerge Big Memory Software, which went public in September, works with Optane persistent memory to scale memory to petabytes to decouple high-performance applications from traditional storage.

This allows MemVerge to provide fast data services, including snapshot, replication, and data recovery, and eliminates performance degradation due to memory paging.

Nebulon

CEO: Siamak Nazari

Nebulon came out of stealth in June 2020 with the introduction of Cloud-Defined Storage, on-premises server storage for mission-critical applications.

Cloud-defined storage combines the cloud-based control plane and PCIe cards on customer servers as a way to deliver enterprise-grade data services for mission-critical applications. Nebulon says cloud storage enables customers to tackle both modern workloads like containers and NoSQL databases and traditional workloads like VMware and clustered SQL databases.

NVISNx

CEO: Glen Day

NVISNx helps businesses visually profile their data so they can better protect their most valuable digital assets and get rid of data that may be toxic or of no value.

The technology firm from Playa Vista, California can receive data from a wide variety of data repositories and data mining applications through its visual analytics engine, which provides meaningful and actionable insights for business, privacy, and security professionals looking to make informed decisions about what data should be protected and what data should be deleted.

StorageOS

CEO, CTO, and Founder: Alex Chircop

StorageOS develops cloud storage technology to provide persistent container storage for stateful customer production applications. The London-based StorageOS’ software-defined technology enables fast failover, replication, in-memory caching, and data reduction through access controls and rules.

When deployed anywhere in a single container, StorageOS dynamically provisions highly available persistent volumes. StorageOS is targeted at developers, infrastructure managers, and platform architects. In September 2020, the company announced the release of StorageOS V2.2 Performance through the Red Hat Marketplace.

Afi

CEO and Chief Product Officer: Vincent Marino

Afi builds intelligent data protection technologies for SaaS environments, including native support for cloud infrastructure data sources such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The company provides complete data protection and security for G Suite and Office 365 and claims to be the only provider that preserves file document IDs, sharing rights and permissions, and offers full-text search to help recover data.

Catalog

CEO and Co-Founder: Hyunjun Park

Catalog, a Boston-based startup specializing in the development of archival storage technology using synthetic DNA, unveiled a new $10 million Series A funding round in September 2020 to keep developing their technology. The startup has already demonstrated a prototype of its technology that is able to write the entire English-language version of Wikipedia, which is about 16 GB of data, onto a tube about 1.5 inches long and 0.25 inches wide.

At the heart of Catalog’s technology is a device that feeds a blank tape at a speed of 16 meters per minute into a modified inkjet printer, which applies drops of synthetic DNA onto fabric. This strap is then moved to the incubation chamber to present the data, which is then written into the DNA flask.

The data reading can be performed using a DNA sequencer.

Fungible

CEO and Co-Founder: Pradeep Sindhu

Santa Clara, California-based Fungible is the developer of the Fungible Storage Cluster, a scale-out all-flash, NVMe-over-Fabrics disaggregated storage platform. This platform is based on the Fungible DPU, or Data Processing Unit, which integrates processors for off-loading storage functionalities, a fast network-on-chip networking accelerator, and a storage stack that includes high-performance, in-line erasure coding, text and image compression, and data encryption to handle such storage services as a raw block, durable block and key-value store for NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF).

InCountry

CEO and Founder: Peter Yared

InCountry is developing what it calls “data residency as a service” to enable companies to run best-in-class data-residency SaaS applications in over 90 countries. San Francisco-based technology enables end-to-end compliance of profile data in country of origin or citizenship and support for data residency auditing for profile regulation in over 90 countries with encryption in both single-user and multi-user modes. is an inhabitant of the environment.

In September, the company raised $18 million in funding with Accenture as one of its investors with plans to accelerate its global expansion to help clients comply with a growing number of national and regional data residency regulations.

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