StrongBox Data Solutions Completes $27 Million Investment Round

StrongBox Data Solutions, Inc., provider of cognitive data management and archive solutions, announced that its parent company has completed a $27 million investment round which includes $20 million from the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, a $13 billion development capital investment fund, and additional funding from its controlling shareholder, Partner One Capital.

This investment is a demonstration of the potential of StrongLink and reflects the overwhelming response the solution has received in the market. The investment will be used to accelerate worldwide expansion of StrongLink.

StrongLink leverages the power of metadata and machine learning to deliver a solution to automate storage and data management across multi-vendor storage environments. It simplifies the complexity of data protection and management, seamlessly connecting any storage and cloud including typically incompatible storage.

“StrongLink introduces machine learning, artificial intelligence and powerful analytics to provide a global, vendor-neutral solution for large data environments,” says David Cerf, CEO, StrongBox Data Solutions. “The investment by the Fonds de solidarité FTQ validates the global response from our customers who have discovered that StrongLink can reduce storage costs and operational complexity. Driven by metadata, StrongLink provides a cross-platform global namespace for complete control of data and storage resources.”

StrongLink automates many of the difficult problems related to data protection, migrations, curation, governance and provenance. It provides customers with an open platform that never locks them into a particular vendor’s storage solution. It is a data-centric approach that uses the artificial intelligence derived from metadata to optimize storage resources and scale to accommodate the world’s most demanding data environments.

“With its strong management team and its proven track record, StrongBox Data Solutions has developed a unique technology that answers market needs,” said Alain Denis, SVP, innovation and agri-food, Fonds de solidarité FTQ. “This investment fits perfectly with our desire to support innovative companies that will build tomorrow’s economy.”

“The fact that an institutional investor such as the Fonds de solidarité FTQ has placed its confidence in StrongBox Data Solutions and StrongLink is a tremendous vote of confidence for us and a true demonstration of the success we are having in the marketplace. The support of such a major investment firm gives us the ability to increase worldwide deployments, which have already proven very successful at major customer sites across the globe,” added Cerf.

Comments

Secondary storage platforms and tiering/migration software through metadata management are really hot.

This investment for StrongBox Data Solutions (SBDS) confirms the interest by the market to one of the most comprehensive approach to address this fast growing data deluge and how to master it. It just extends its market adoption with already several accounts who recognize the advantages of the solution.

SBDS began its business by acquiring the StrongBox product business from Crossroads Systems, Inc. in April 2016 for $1.85 million and started by promoting StrongBox LTFS NAS Appliance.

But SBDS is recognized for several quarters by StrongLink, its new flagship product. The company has decided to build and design a very comprehensive product able to be the storage and data 'unificator' across independent storage brands, models and product generations playing in that case a horizontal role thanks to the data that serves as the glue between silos and devices. The product fits in two categories at the same time, it's about data management but also storage management, and invite uses to continue with their current environments and devices, build strong data protection policies and reduce costs of the storage infrastructure. StrongLink is defined as a Cognitive Data Management product to optimize cost, data usage and maximize productivity from the same environment.

Among multiple features, we found:

- In-place non-disruptive deployment especially for current storage devices,
- Data classification and indexing,
- Smart versioning of all data and metadata,
- Strong data integrity checks,
- Smart pools to form logical groups of storage managed via just a metadata tag and for ease of management with policies attached to them,
- Data mobility across any devices and locations,
- Data protection extension with additional copies if needed at various locations and units,
- Search and Orchestration for any storage and any data, I still have some doubt about databases integration,
- Unification of Data and Storage management with original access methods maintained such NFS, SMB, S3 or Swift for instance.

Click to enlarge

SBDS belongs to the group of active players with Komprise, Primary Data, Versity, Quantum, Seven10, Moonwalk, infinite io, Point Software and Systems, Grau Data, QStar or SGI DMF, Cohesity or gateway vendors that introduced a multi-tier data management model offering different flavors: HSM, tiering, archiving, migration, DR, cloud-based storage, etc…

Already confirming as a hot market segment, 2018 will be more active in that domain with new partnerships and we anticipate some M&As.