9 enterprise-storage startups to watch
LightbitsLabs
Year founded: 2014
Funding: $54.2M
Headquarters: Kfar Saba, Israel
CEO: Eran Kirzner, who formerly served as VP Software and Solutions, Enterprise Storage Division for PMC-Sierra
What they do: Develop NVMe over TCP software-defined block storage.
The latest version of their storage software, LightOS 2.1, is an NVMe/TCP scale-out, disaggregated storage solution designed to perform like local flash.
When installed on commodity servers in large-scale datacenters, LightOS 2.1 automatically optimizes for I/O intensive compute clusters, such as Kafka, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB, and time-series databases. Each storage server in the cluster can support up to 64K namespaces and 16K connections.
LightOS 2.1 also supports containerized environments like Kubernetes that require large-scale clusters with persistent and durable storage for rapid node migration, workload rebalancing, or recovery from failure without copying data over the network.
Competitors include: Ceph, Excelero, Fungible, Pavilion Data, and Pure Storage
Customers include: Finanz Informatik Technologies Services, AMPD, and Equinix Metal
Why they’re a hot startup to watch: Lightbits Labs has all of the right ingredients–solid funding, strong senior team, early customer traction–to compete in a tough NVMe market. The startup has raised more than $54M, and has named customers.
The founding team’s pedigree is also a mark in Lightbits’ favor. CEO and co-founder Eran Kirzner gained VP-level experience at PMC-Sierra and Wintegra. Co-founder and Chairman Avigdor Willenz co-founded Annapurna Labs, which was acquired by Amazon in 2015, and co-founder and Chief Scientist Muli Ben-Yehuda served as chief Scientist for software-defined data-center vendor Stratoscale.
Originally published on NetworkWorld
