Start-Up's Profile: Campaign Storage

Based in Boulder, CO, Campaign Storage, LLC was founded in March 2016 by two storage veterans:

Peter Braam: He participates in the SKA telescope project design during the last 3-4 years, is principal at Braam Research, founder and architect for Docforce, worked at Xyratex for several periods, as well at ClusterStor (acquired by Xyratex), Sun, Cluster File Systems (acquired by Sun), Parallel Scientific, Carnegie Mellon University, Mountain View Data, RedHat, TurboLinux and Stelias Computing (acquired by TurboLinux).

Nathan C. Thompson is CEO and chairman of tape storage firm Spectra Logic, a company he founded in October 1979 at the age of 19.

The name Campaign Storage was invented by Kyle Lamb, acting deputy group leader over HPC infrastructure, Los Alamos, and Ben McClelland, and now became a company.

It has closed a second round of seed funding, operates a small team, and announced its first product, an HSM software, at Super Computing 2016.

Developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2014 under the name of MarFS, Campaign Storage is a software-defined storage technology to manage tiers of storage enabling management of trillion of files and exabytes of data. It provides tools for massive parallel data movement between the new low cost, industry standard Campaign Storage tiers with industry standard storage hardware.

Beyond moving the data, the storage software offers new tools to execute data management policies and archiving, including transparent integration with HSM frameworks and third party policy managers.

The file system can co-exist with many data management technologies such as Robinhood.

Unlike archiving solutions, metadata is stored using ZFS technology, for reliability and flexibility with storage management.

Campaign Storage stands out from other solutions by building on industry standard object storage systems, many of them being supported.

New tier at Campaign Storage

Deployment of Campaign Storage in relation to other storage systems

Last November 2016, Spectra Logic announced an archive solution for Lustre file systems widely deployed in HPC, education and government supercomputers, and data centers. The solution, which includes embedded HSM software by Campaign Storage, works with Spectra’s BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway, Intel’s Lustre file system, and an industry-standard policy manager.

Campaign Storage and Spectra Logic