'Drive-level server' startup pockets $5m to grow object storing biz

Five million dollars has just been stumped up to grow a startup making object storage drive-based servers.

OpenIO is this startup, which says it turns disk drives and SSDs into object-storing and event-driven processing micro-servers. The idea is that potentially massive capacity stores can be built this way, with a distributed array of drives providing so-called serverless computing.

Its drives have Arm processor servers bolted on to them and these run its open source software. OpenIO has used its seed funding to develop its product technology and prove its basic usefulness.

It says it has successfully completed projects with petabyte-scale production platforms and its software is managing hundreds of billions of objects. The majority of these are on standard X86 servers though, with local disk drives, in the usual object storage style, rather than the drive-level servers it is developing.

The company has now gained $5m in a round led by Elaia Partners, Partech Ventures, and Nord France Amorçage. It will use the funding to expand its team, consolidate the EMEA market, and develop new markets in the USA and Japan.

CEO and co-founder Laurent Denel said: "Huge amounts of data are produced and consumed every day, and the IT industry is experiencing a major revolution. Big data, IoT and machine learning applications are driving this transformation."

Small and nippy data storing micro-servers might be good at the IoT edge as well as being used to build massive data stores to analyse the masses of IoT data. It will be interesting to see how OpenIO develops its drive-level server software to appeal more to its Big Data, IOT and machine learning markets and opens the door to more sales. ®