RainStor (Formerly Clearpace) Enters U.S. Market

RainStor, a UK infrastructure software company that provides repository for historical structured data, announced its entrance into the U.S. data management market with an online data retention solution that reduces the cost and complexity of preserving information in the enterprise and the cloud. As part of this announcement, RainStor (formerly Clearpace) launched RainStor 3.5 and opened a San Francisco-based office to support its growing portfolio of U.S.-based partners and their customers.

Organizations of all sizes have problems handling massive and growing amounts of data. RainStor confronts this challenge by providing technology that lets companies manage more structured data with less hardware, storage and resources. Optimized for considerable scalability on commodity hardware and the cloud, RainStor’s value proposition challenges the traditional database and data warehouse vendors by providing the most cost effective way to reduce, retain and retrieve data over the long-term, no matter where that data lives.

"While many database and data warehouse vendors seem to be in a war of words about sophisticated and proprietary architectures that deliver ‘world-record’ performance, we prefer to highlight how little commodity hardware, storage and IT support you need to satisfy data retention requirements with our technology," said John Bantleman, CEO of RainStor. "Our partners recognize that there are many information preservation scenarios that do not require complex and expensive architectures delivering real-time analysis; they’re focused on delivering data retention solutions that balance great performance with keeping massive amounts of information at the lowest possible cost."

"Companies of all sizes are being deluged with growing amounts of information and ‘big data’ has become a big problem," said Simon Robinson, Research Director at The 451 Group. "IT managers are looking for technology that is both scalable and economical, so approaches that allow them to keep more data with less infrastructure are going to be worth a closer look. In addition, RainStor’s ability to support cloud-based data retention initiatives is certainly challenging the position of the traditional data management vendors."

RainStor 3.5 is optimized for massive and cost-efficient scalability on commodity hardware and the cloud enabling companies to manage more data with less infrastructure and minimal effort.

Enhanced features in version 3.5 include:

Extreme Data Compression

• Massive (97%) storage savings
• Easily transportable data files
• Use any storage or disk technology

Simplified Data Management

• Manage structured data with standard file systems
• No special skills or expensive DBA’s needed
• Gain on demand access with SQL tools

High Level of Scalability on Commodity Hardware

• Cost-efficient load and query performance
• Manage limitless data volumes
• Use virtual and cloud resources elastically

With more than 35 customers acquired through partners in the last 12 months, RainStor’s traction highlights the need for technology that both stores and manages large volumes of inactive data and ensures that critical data is query-able at any time. RainStor provides underlying technology for companies like Informatica, who embedded the technology within its Informatica Data Archive product.

"Our goal is to provide our customers with an ‘optimal’ archive store and with the help of RainStor we are able to achieve this," said Adam Wilson, General Manager, Information Lifecycle Management, Informatica. "The integration of RainStor within Informatica Data Archive enables customers to drive the cost out of retaining historical data."