Start-Up Profile: NooBaa

HQs
Herzliya, Israel, and Boston, MA

Date founded
November 2013

Financial funding
$2 million, seed (early 2014)
$2 million, convertible debt
Total: $4 million from JVP, OurCrowd and others

Main executives:

Yuval Dimnik, co-founder and CEO, worked for thre years at Dell as FluidFS system engineering director after being C++ programmer, R&D team leader and then director of support for Exanet. Formerly he was IBM BAP team leader and IDF project leader.

Guy Margalit, co-founder and CTO, was formerly at Dell, Exanet and IDF.
Eran Tamir, VP of product, worked for Quotium/Synopsis, Radware and IDF.
Mike Davis, CMO, was previously at Dell, Ocarina and Sun.

Number of employees
15

Technology
The software aggregates capacity and compute resources across dispersed datacenters and cloud providers into a single private cloud storage resource. A VM-hosted control-plane and metadata system assures QoS and data integrity while providing flexibility to accommodate a heterogeneous infrastructure. Unlike NAS and object storage systems in the market, it can consume any host-based capacity, Linux or Windows, virtual or physical, large or small, fast or slow, and uses advanced placement logic to automate data placement and healing.

NooBaa also supports an arbitrary blend of datacenter resources with public cloud VMs and storage services including native integration with AWS S3 and Azure Blog Storage.

Key Features:

S3 API interface
Ability to consume unused capacity in shared-hosts (sharing and evacuation algorithm assures no QoS impact)
Ability to automatically and seamlessly incorporate new host, media, file-system, and networking technologies into a cluster
Placement and DR policies set at a bucket level. Easy to migrate datasets to cloud and between clouds
Global de-dupe, compression, 2-level fingerprinting, and data-path encryption
Data and I/O localization
Scalable to tens of petabytes in capacity and thousands of nodes, globally distributed.

Product description
It’s a software-only solution for unstructured data workloads such as backup, general archival that establishes a private cloud across storage service across the customers’ choice of infrastructure. By maximizing automation, by leveraging existing hardware investments, and by eliminating vendor, media, or cloud lock-in, it provides low TCO for scale-out storage.

Installation can be performed by customers in 15 minutes, according to the company, first by installing the NooBaa Core VM, second by designating a minimum of three storage nodes for resilience.

Cloud-based hosts and on-premises capacity may be woven together in a continuous fabric for flexible protection strategies or in support of cloud migration. NooBaa reduces lock-in costs by providing migration of data buckets between resource pools without availability loss and while maintaining a single S3-compatible API interface.

Released date
Beta shipments in late 2015 and Community Edition License in August 2016 to be available next February

Price
Free Community Edition License (limited to 20TB), or Enterprise License, which provides H/A and unlimited capacity, at $15/TB/month for data stored with no cost for capacity provisioned

Roadmap

Erasure coding – mid-2017
Advanced resource orchestration capabilities – late 2017

Partners
Splunk, Microsoft, Commvault, Veritas, Moonwalk, Amazon, Microsoft, Avere, Milestone

Distributors and OEMs
Channel program is scheduled for mid-2017. Meanwhile, the start-up is engaging with specific market firms who bring solution-specific or vertical-specific competencies and early customer exposure. It is in discussions with OEMs.

Number of customers
100

Customers
No name revealed

Applications
Targets large-scale retention-oriented applications:

Scalable logging (Splunk, ELK, etc)
Large-environment backup workflows
Archival, preservation, and re-use of digital assets
Content distribution

Target market
Large enterprise, online retail, logistics, media production and distribution, bio-informatics, GIS

Competitors
NooBaa is accessed through the S3 interface with object storage semantics, thus competes with clustered designs such as Swiftstack, Scality, Ceph, EMC ECS and HDS HCP. However, the architecture, based on an orchestration approach provides substantially greater hardware and resource flexibility, including arbitrary blending of public, private and WAN-distributed capacity resources.

[This article was written following a free four-day invitation in Israel by The IT Press Tour. Ed]