Start-Up Profile: Minio, in Open Source Object Storage

Company
Minio, Inc. (the name stands for minimal object storage and derives from company’s belief in philosophy of minimalism)

HQs
Silicon Valley, CA

Date Founded
November 22, 2014

Financial funding
Seed round funding of $3.3 million just raised, led by General Catalyst and Nexus Ventures. Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Index Ventures, Mark Leslie (former founder, chairman and CEO of Veritas Software), Brian Stevens (VP cloud platforms, Google), Ben Golub (former president and CEO, Gluster), Lanham Napier (former Rackspace chief executive) and Andrew Feldman also participated in the financing.

Executives, all of them co-founders

Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, CEO: Was co-founder of Gluster (acquired by Red Hat for $136 million) in 2005 and its CTO until 2011, and then at office of the CTO of Red Hat from 2011 to 2014. He is also member of the board of advisors of Fastor Systems, in NVMe compliant solid-state storage, acquired by SMART.

Harshavardhana: Also comes from Red Hat and Gluster.
Frederick Kautz: Was senior principal software engineer at Red Hat in 2014 after being CTO of GridX.
Garima Kapoorn, CFO

Number of employees
4 (the co-founders)

Technology
Minio aims to democratize cloud storage by building object storage in the open source community. It is a minimal object storage server written in Golang and licensed under Apache license v2. It is compatible with Amazon S3 APIs.

Minio Object Storage has three components:

Minio Server Application: developers can build their own cloud storage with Minio server.
Minio Client: A tool to copy or move large quantities of data across the cloud.
Minio Libraries: SDK for developers to enable cloud storage capability in their application. Currently Java, Node.js and Go languages are supported.

Minio follows a ‘minimalist’ design principle. It reduces all the complicated features of storage to essentially get, put and list.

Core of Minio’s innovation is a technology called Donut. It is a distributed erasure coded storage backend, similar to NetApp’s WAFL or Oracle ZFS. It uses rubberband erasure coding to compute variable erasure parity codes. Donut can withstand multiple server and disk failures. Server also performs continuous SHA512 checksum verification to detect silent data corruption.

Released date
As of Jun 17 2015:

Minio client and libraries are ready for public use
Minio server runs on developers laptop or on a standalone server.
Public Minio server is available for application development and
testing.

Roadmap
Next 6/12 months, the company will announce distributed storage capabilities and a browser based user/operator console. Minio will receive continuous updates as there is no concept of version numbers.

Target market
Application developers to build their own cloud storage

Competitors
Amazon S3, Swiftstack