Hammerspace Swallowed RozoFS Silently

The technology is not lost for everyone but it’s a shame that an alternative scale-out NAS solution like RozoFS ends like this as the market demands is even bigger than it was. But the question of the market alignment is key.

RozoFS Systems SAS‘ product was and is still used by several M&E and HPC/technical environments in US and Europe.

The architecture is asymmetric with one metadata server and data servers configured in disaggregated or converged models. It was designed around 2010 as Rozo was founded in 2010 in University of Nantes in France. It has an innovative erasure coding (EC) scheme named Mojette Transform thanks to some specific R&D university projects and delivers interesting performance results for primary storage with EC on.

Some executions challenges hit the company with difficulties to raise money with always the question of the dilution in mind. Pierre Evenou, CEO and founder, moved to California around 2015 with the idea to boost the development of the company. He was helped there by Michel Courtoy and the development stayed in Nantes, France, where Didier Feron, the CTO, was based.

Hammerspace, Inc. didn’t mention this move but it’s not a surprise as the company maintains some mystery around some of its activities. As an example we’re still waiting a VC round pre-announced in autumn 2021 and we’re second quarter of 2023.

For Hammerspace, it’s a strategic asset to penetrate some accounts and add a storage technology beyond their data access methods, expertise and technologies. For Rozo, finally the technology has some chance to survive, we’ll see.

The operation has been done around 3Q22 and November seems to be a pivot moment as the 2 images below display. We understand it is an asset acquisition, Rozo web site continues to exist and there is no mention on Hammerspace or Rozo websites as of today Monday April 17.

Same remark for today, Pierre Evenou, CEO, and Didier Feron, CTO, don’t mention anything on their LinkedIn profile and even didn’t change their job title without any end date.

But Jean-Pierre Monchanin changed his job profile on LinkedIn as the image below shows. Please check the experience paragraph.