Datomia, New Player In Dispersed Storage

Founded in Nevada in 2013, Datomia is a brand of Cloud Crowding Corp. and operates from New-York, NY.

The company was founded by David Yanovsky, currently CEO and president, and Moshe Wilshinsky, co-founder and chairman. We found 15 employees associated with the project on LinkedIn.

David Yanovsky was CEO of DataCradle, in Talinn, Estonia, and worked before at Playtech as consultant, Jetro Platforms as CTO and founder and Intel as software engineer. Even if his LinkedIn profile mentioned that he is still CEO of DataCradle, the company ceased operations in 4Q13 and the web site is empty.

The company presents itself as a provider of frictionless software-defined storage and streaming solutions that solves the major pain points of the modern enterprise with a single pane of glass. Datomia belongs to the cloud dispersed or decentralized storage category with several other players.

The firm offers a mixed of object storage and NAS technologies considering several good ideas promoted by these two storage approaches. It delivers finally an ubiquitous storage offering as data can be accessed from any application, any geographic location from public or private storage entities with a simple HTTPS transfer protocol.

Its technology, named Datomia Datomizer, is deployed as a virtual appliance or docker container and can run on any virtualization layer such VMware, Xen, OpenStack, etc. and can be embedded in dedicated hardware appliance as well.

Data are segmented, chunked, compressed, de-duped, encrypted and fully anonymously scattered across a range of storage nodes thanks to an unique erasure coding technique, what the company calls the data atomization process. This distributed information are called Data Atoms and group data, metadata and what the company named information DNA. Without Datomia algorithms, it’s impossible to understand any piece of data. From a user perspective, application will see a single namespace on Linux and Windows systems.

Datomia promotes two products: Datomizer S3 NAS and DatomizerVault Enterprise as seen in the user guide but also named Vault Multi-Cloud NAS. The first one relies on Amazon S3 service with NFS and SMB capabilities and iSCSI. It is strange to list iSCSI as a NAS capability as NAS is a file storage service associated with file sharing protocols. The second is multi-cloud with the additional support of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage and IBM Cloud Object Storage.

Trial for Datomia is available.

It reminds me some pretty similar decentralized or dispersed storage approaches on private or public clouds, with players like Aerofs, Aetherstore, Blockade, Cloudplan, Kerstor, Ubistorage, Ugloo, Sia.tech, Space Monkey, Storj, Symform, Transporter, Tudzu, or Wuala. Some of them still exist, others disappeared, got acquired or changed their model to offer P2P backup.