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Upstart DEY touts Facebook-style storage for all and sundry

Step 1: Buy hard disks. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Become Google

Data juggling upstart DEY Storage claims it can bring Amazon, Facebook and Google-style storage to businesses with a silky software coating.

Why bother paying any attention to it? Well, DEY has just raised $3m in seed funding from the great and the good including Seagate boss Steve Luczo and Virtual Instruments CEO and ex-Symantec boss John Thompson. If they are putting money in then they see a good thing.

DEY was founded by Garrett D'Amore, VP of engineering; Richard Elling, CTO; and Jason Yoho, CEO. Their last name initials spell out, er, DEY.

The firm wants to remove customers from the nitty-gritty of hardware with a software veneer - or as Yoho put it: "DEY is unbundling storage management from the physical layer to provide customers with a storage system which is massively scalable and designed to align and integrate with their services-based infrastructures.”

Amazon, Google and Facebook buy cheap-as-chips hard drives and use thousands of them ganged together to cater for their online storage needs. Facebook fleshes out its racks with flash. These three giants don't store their data on arrays bought from EMC, NetApp, Dell or anyone else - that would be far too expensive. They have developed their own system software to turn their bulk drives into usable storage, and DEY aims to produce equivalent software so that large-scale virtualised and services-oriented data centre storage can enjoy the same economies of scale and basic infrastructural simplicity.

D'Amore claimed "DEY technology places no limits on storage", and added that his company "gives customers a variety of choices that meet their data, performance and capacity requirements while optimising their per dollar investment”.

The company, based in San Mateo, California, has several clients signed up for early beta test product deployments. It could be one to watch. ®

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