Who’s Leading the Storage Startup Landscape?

June 17, 2016 Off By David
Article Written by David Marshall

Tape Storage

Just last week, Red Herring announced the winners of its 2016 Top 100 North America award, which recognizes the leading private companies in the region, celebrating startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

It’s interesting to see that many of the winners fall in the IT space, and three in particular fall specifically in the storage category: SwiftStackZadara and Igneous. Virtualization, public cloud and other relatively recent changes in the datacenter have turned the storage world upside down, creating a market for fresh, new, innovative solutions that save time, money and resources. Many new companies have formed over the past several years, jumping on the opportunity presented by the need for better, more modern storage. But what is it about certain solutions and vendors that make them stand out amongst the others?

 

According to Don Jaworski, CEO of one of the winning storage startups, SwiftStack, "today’s top storage innovations are the ones that enable multiple industries to harness their data to create breakthroughs in, for example, life sciences research or content delivery in the media and entertainment space. In a world where almost all business models now require the benefits of cloud infrastructure, organizations are looking for new kinds of storage solutions that aid their journey from the legacy storage infrastructure they’ve had, to the architecture they need to support modern applications."

Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage, another Red Herring winner says that "next-gen data center technology is in high demand as enterprises realize they no longer have to settle for traditional IT solutions with all its limitations – which is exactly why Red Herring Top 100 North America winners are dominated by storage and cloud solutions. Companies like Zadara Storage, SwiftStack and Igneous give customers a market edge by enabling them to deploy agile, scalable and lower-cost IT architectures."

As time goes on it will be interesting to see which solutions rise to the top, but one things for sure, it’s an exciting time to be in storage; a time when IT professionals have more choices than ever in their efforts to update and modernize their storage platforms.

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About the Author

David Marshall is an industry recognized virtualization and cloud computing expert, a seven time recipient of the VMware vExpert distinction, and has been heavily involved in the industry for the past 16 years.  To help solve industry challenges, he co-founded and helped start several successful virtualization software companies such as ProTier, Surgient and Hyper9 and also spent a few years transforming desktop virtualization while at Virtual Bridges.

David is also a co-author of two very popular server virtualization books: "Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center" and "VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center."  He was also the Technical Editor on Wiley’s "Virtualization for Dummies" and "VMware VI3 for Dummies" books.  David also authored countless articles for a number of well known technical magazines, including: InfoWorld, Virtual-Strategy and TechTarget.  And in 2004, he founded the oldest independent virtualization and cloud computing news site, VMblog.com, which he still operates today.

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