Datera Emerges from Stealth Mode, Launches Cloud Storage Software

Cloud storage startup Datera emerged from stealth on Tuesday with its first product, Datera Elastic Data Fabric, along with an announcement that it has picked up $40 million in funding to back its plans to deliver scale-out storage software designed for DevOps style operations.

Datera’s storage software makes RESTful storage fabric for large-scale clouds based on APIs and policies from standard commodity hardware. The company says the operations requirements of legacy storage architecture have weighed down DevOps environments, while its solution enables “Infrastructure as Code.”

“In the cloud era, things scale up and down constantly. It’s always in flux. At scale, you can’t operate this kind of environment manually. It must be automated,” said Marc Fleischmann, Co-Founder and CEO of Datera. “In this world, customers want their storage fast, at scale, with a self-service delivery model. They can’t afford to wait for someone to hand-craft a LUN whenever a developer needs some storage.”

Datera Elastic Data Fabric natively interacts with OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware vSphere, and container orchestration platforms through iSCSI.  It features a “grow-as-you-go” model, flash-first design, and heterogeneous component support. It also optimizes asset utilization and simplifies operations with multi-tenancy and quality of service for both cloud-native and traditional workloads. The service is already in production use by multiple large enterprises and service providers, Datera says.

“In order to achieve the benefits promised by containers and microservices, the application development process and the underlying infrastructure must be designed to power modern application architectures,” Florian Leibert, Co-Founder and CEO at Mesosphere said in a statement. “Datera Elastic Data Fabric’s architecture definitely meets this requirement, complementing our Datacenter Operating System with a very low-latency and high-performance block storage system that allows container operations teams to deliver both micro-services scale and transaction speeds.”

The funding round was lead by Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Silicon Valley veterans Andy Bechtolsheim and Pradeep Sindhu.

The company says its storage software starting configurations deliver 150TB of capacity with 150,000 IOPS, and support scaling mix-and-match node configurations.

Datera’s announcement emphasizes the ineffective scaling of pre-cloud storage administration methods for modern DevOps environments, a position which echoes a study released by TechValidate and SolidFire in November.

EMC updated its own software-defined Elastic Cloud Storage in January with lower prices.