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Sacks of cash chucked at upstart dressed to the nines

Object storage biz Amplidata banks $8m investment

Object storage startup Amplidata has grabbed $8m of funding to help stack up the products that it claims virtually eliminate data loss. Competitor Caringo, meanwhile, agrees that you don't need tape for archive storage, having integrated its CAStor product as back-end storage for Symantec's Enterprise Vault.

Amplidata will use the $8m cash injection – which it acquired in a C-round of funding – to grow its business. Intel Capital is joining the original venture capitalists in the round.

The startup received a cool $6m in a B-round funding in 2010, two years after receiving seed funding of $2m in 2008. Amplidata will use the latest round to develop sales and support organisations in the USA, Europe and Asia, with CEO Wim De Wispelaere saying it “will allow us to accelerate our business in world-wide big data accounts".

We understand that one of the funders, Endeavour Vision, had previously looked at funding Caringo but then decided to pass on the opportunity.

Amplidata's AmpliStor is targeting big data applications, both archive and production-focused, and the company claims customers can enjoy petabyte-scale storage that's fast, available and low cost. It says its version of erasure coding technology, called BitSpread, is less CPU-intensive than those used by competing object storage suppliers, making object ingest and retrieval faster.

The startup claims this low CPU overhead combines with Western Digital green drive use to lower power requirements compared to other storage systems.

As ever with object storage, the product is scalable and self-healing. It's also active media archives – with one customer being the Montreux Jazz live video archive.

De Wispelaere says AmpliStor features "ten nines durability", meaning that any object will be available 99.99999999 per cent of the time, and says this "virtually eliminates data loss".

Meanwhile, competitor Caringo has added Symantec Enterprise Vault 10 integration so that users of Symantec's software can store their archived files on Caringo's CAStor object storage. It says this provides up to 40 per cent lower total-cost-of-ownership cost than either NAS filers or – perhaps surprisingly – tape.

CEO Mark Goros says Caringo's object storage uses standard X86 servers and "scales by simply plugging in new drives, using [customers'] choice of hardware vendor and any size hard drive. We ...are ... bringing cloud architecture and cloud economics to Symantec Enterprise Vault 10 users which will enable them to not only keep up with their archive growth, but get ahead of it so that they can focus on their core business.”

There is no need for tape in this view, with Caringo saying its cost/GB of object storage on disk is lower than the cost/GB of storing files on tape.

Customers can freely try out CAStor for Enterprise Vault 10. Details here. ®

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