Coldago Research Unveils Gems for 2023

Started in 2010, this list is now a classic for the storage industry. In 2023, 5 companies join the Gem category, some are recent and others are more older but all lead their domain in various dimensions. For more details you can check the dedicated page.

Graid Technology
It is a young company developing an innovative GPU-based RAID controller for NVMe drives. The SupremeRAID products line delivers impressive performance levels. It represents an interesting RAID implementation leveraging the power of GPU and dedicated off-CPU data processing capabilities. We’ll see more and more such solution in the coming quarters and this approach is already present at several OEM server shops.

Linbit
It exists for more than 20 years, founded in Austria, and it is clearly the reference in data replication for Linux environments with DRBD. Implemented purely as software, this new example of SDS, serves as a foundation of Linux HA clusters, data persistency and more recently within Kubernetes environments. The team has also developed a Windows flavor of DRBD.

Pliops
It is a recent Israeli company that designs, builds and develops dedicated data processing PCIe cards, named XDP for eXtreme Data Processor, to boost data services such encryption, compression, protection and access acceleration. It supports all kinds of NVMe SSDs back-ends, local or network attached, and boosts SQL and KV databases in addition to data protection with advanced RAID techniques.

PoINT Software & Systems
It is also an established player, founded in 1994 in Germany. It is recognized for its leadership in the unstructured data management with Storage Manager as Tiering and HSM solution and also for Archival Gateway and more recently for the S3-to-Tape, a sort of modern VTL, a hot topic on the market for a few months.

UnifabriX
With the recent announcement from Intel with its 4th generation of Xeon processors and the support of CXL 1.1, it clearly confirms that the memory disaggregation, expansion, pooling and fabric represents what servers, clusters and data centers architects have looking for for several years. UnifabriX leads the pack in the domain with a famous demo, supporting already CXL 2.0 and 3.0, during the recent SuperComputing 2022 shown in Dallas last November. CXL is hot and ready to become one of the dominant technology in the coming years.