Start-Up Profile: Storiant

Company
Storiant, Inc. (SageCloud changed its name to Storiant in April 2014)

HQs
Boston, MA

Date founded
July 2012

Financial funding
$13.2 million from Matrix Partners, Braemar Energy Ventures, and private investors

Main executives:

Mark Rees (left), Jeff Flowers (right)

Jeff Flowers, CEO and co-founder: His inspiration for Storiant originated at Carbonite, an online backup service where he was co-founder and CTO, and responsible for the storage of more than 130PB of consumer data. He also co-founded Sonexis and FaxNet and earlier served as VP of engineering at Computer Pictures and as VP of development at ON Technology.
Mark Rees, CTO and co-founder: In his 35-year career in the software industry, he has collaborated with Flowers in a number of start-ups including Pilot Software, FaxNet and most recently Carbonite. He has worked across a range of software specialties from communications and compilers to databases and storage.

Number of employees
40

Technology
Long-term storage software for private clouds, with public cloud economics

Product description
Storiant software for private clouds rivals the cost efficiencies and scalability of the public cloud in an on-premises storage solution. Modeled on the web-scale storage architectures proven at Amazon, Google, and Facebook, Storiant makes it possible to store an almost infinite amount of data long-term being scalable to exabytes with access in seconds. It is an SEC compliant, object-storage software solution for tier-2 and tier-3 applications. It offers options including a NAS interface that uses NFS and CIFS protocols.

To run Storiant’s software, the certified hardware is provided by customers or integrators and consists of:

Primary rack: Storage, database, and management servers, six 60-disk enclosures (1PB useable) or six 96-drive enclosures (1.6PB useable)
Secondary expansion rack(s): Database server, plus additional storage servers as needed, eight 60-disk enclosures (1.35PBs useable) or eight 96-drive enclosures (2.2PB useable)

Key Features of the software:

Object storage software for private clouds

For unstructured data including images, video, and audio; and for industry-specific geospatial, seismic, scientific, medical, and machine data
Exabyte scalability

Low TCO

Less than $.01/GB/month
Power-down capability uses 80% less power, doubles disk life
Runs on low-cost drives
Runs on open-standards hardware
Reduced support costs via automatic drive replacement

Reliable

Eighteen nines of reliability with two copies
Continuous data checking

Meets SEC and regulatory requirements

Immutable / WORM
SEC 17a-4(f) compliant

High throughput for fast migration and big data analytics

Wire speed on 10GbE
Dynamic striping

Choice of application interfaces

REST interfaces – Swift/S3
Client library – Java / Python / .Net
Storiant Link: NFS/CIFS

Multi-tenant

For infrastructure-as-a-service providers

Release date
September, 2014

Price range
$300,000/PB with SEC-compliance and NAS gateway

Roadmap
Native support for Hadoop, user-configurable performance (from always-on, active archive to cold storage)

Partners
Symantec, CommVault

Distributors
Avnet/RGS, Racklive, Hyve Solutions, Snowcap Technologies, Cambridge Computer, Innovative Software Solutions, NexTech Solutions, Cresting Wave

Number of customers
10 including Markley Group (for 11PB) and Carbonite

Applications
Hadoop data lake; private cloud storage; financial regulatory compliance; backup and BC; cold storage; tape replacement; unstructured data repository; SaaS (service providers needing to compete with public cloud alternatives)

Target markets
Financial services, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, cloud-service providers, oil and gas, media an entertainment; security

Competitors
Traditional storage vendors, object storage software providers, and public cloud services