Amplidata Closes €2.5 Million Series A Funding

Amplidata NV, in next-generation distributed storage technology for public and private clouds, has closed a first round of institutional funding, totaling €2.5M, with Big Bang Ventures.

Belgium-based Amplidata provides storage technology that is ten thousand times more reliable than current RAID based technologies, requires three times less storage and power and is thereby five times less expensive than current storage solutions. The Amplidata Distributed Storage System changes the way data is stored. The company’s patent pending BitSpread encoding technology offers the scalability and ease-of-use of a next generation RAIN grid, creating a 10,000 times more reliable alternative to RAID. Through more efficient usage of power and raw storage capacity, Amplidata decreases the storage cost. Amplidata scales up to tens of Petabytes.

The company is addressing some of the inherent weaknesses of high capacity disk systems, such as performance, bit error rates, mean time between failures and RAID rebuild times which have not improved sufficiently to keep up with the explosion of digital storage needs.

Amplidata was in founded in 2008 by Wim De Wispelaere (CEO) and Wouter Van Eetvelde (COO), two storage veterans. They have been involved in the development and launch of several innovative products and technologies. Serial entrepreneur and high-tech visionary Kristof De Spiegeleer is the primary investor. Commenting on the new funding round, Kristof De Spiegeleer said, "It is a pleasure to work with Big Bang Ventures again. Our past successes have proven that they contribute a lot through their understanding of the market and experience in helping start-up organizations successfully expand."

Wim De Wispelaere clarifies: "After having booked our first successful deployments of the BitSpread technology, the BBV investment will allow us to ramp up sales and marketing activities across Europe and in the US. The introduction of high capacity SATA disks represents a huge opportunity to store massive amounts of digital data. But as RAID does not work on these, it requires a paradigm shift to build reliable and easy to manage storage systems with them. Amplidata BitSpread is the first to combine high reliability and scalability with high efficiency and performance."

Frank Maene, Managing Partner of Big Bang Ventures, on the talent of De Spiegeleer, "We have successfully worked several times with Kristof over the last ten years and I consider him to be one of the most driven and successful entrepreneurs that I know." Maene sees very high potential for the Amplidata technology. "The Amplidata technology meets the three main requirements for storage in the age of cloud computing. It is the most reliable storage solution out there with the highest possible efficiency and it is ultimately scalable. They rightfully call it unbreakable technology."

Comments

Europe is a desert of the storage industry compared to USA, but there is a remarkable team of few people in Belgium that founded half a dozen of successful start-ups since 1999 (see below).

The Amplidata's trio De Spiegeleer, De Wispelaere and Van Eetvelde was previously with DataCenter Technologies in de-dupe (acquired by Symantec in 2005 for $58 million) and Dedigate (acquired by Terremark in 2005 for $7 million)). De Spiegeleer also added Q-layer (acquired by Sun in 2009) to his track record. And you find Big Bang Ventures, the new investor in the start-up, involved in the same companies: DataCenter Technologies, Dedigate, Q-layer, and also Racktivity (an Amplidata partner for low-power racks).

Amplidata is based in Lochristi, near Gent, Belgium, like many of them (see below and adds Racktivity), with engineering team across Belgium, Germany, Egypt and India. It was founded by a team of storage veterans who developed BitSpread technology. Amplidata is in fact the new name and commercial version of the B-Virtual cloud storage solution, the difference being that Amplidata is now delivering the storage system now on pre-installed storage appliances.

These appliances are 1U rack mountable storage 'bricks' with 6TB (3x1.5TB) or 16TB (8x2TB) of raw disk capacity with the following benefits, according to the company: 10.000 times higher reliability than RAID 6, self managing and healing, unlimited scalability by adding storage nodes, block access with 2 level caching across SSD and HD, unlimited zero copy snapshots, and full R/W clones, low power consumption (<10W per TB).

"The Amplidata storage system scales easily without client reconfiguration by simply adding storage appliances, starting with a few nodes and then growing to several petabytes. The system reconfigures and heals itself automatically in the event of a disk, node, rack or even full datacenter failure. Data integrity is continuously verified and proactively healed if disk bit errors are encountered," wrote us De Wispelaerein an email. "It is available in four different products, one for each storage need. AmpliStor includes a series of standard SAN interfaces which allow integration in existing storage environments. Caching across solid state and hard disks delivers high performance, while unlimited snapshots, zero copy cloning and thin provisioning reduce raw storage consumption. AmpliVM is tuned to provide disk capacity for virtual machines. It supports cloning and migration of virtual machines without data copy or movement. AmpliCloud enables you to build private or public cloud infrastructures. AmpliVault guarantees data availability and longevity for large volumes of backup and archive data."

It's not the first time we have heard about RAIN grid, storing data across a selection of disks distributed across storage nodes, racks and sites, and even eventually on the Web. It's a promising RAID technology, in fact the first new one since late 1980s and the famous idea of students David Patterson, Garth Gibson and Randy Katz from the University of California, Berkeley. They invented the five levels, from -0 to -5. RAID-6 is just an enhancement of RAID-5, more secure with one more spare HDD to double distributed parity. For example, this new idea authorizes enterprise reliability using low-cost SATA HDDs and solves the difficulties encountered with RAID-based SSDs. Furthermore, you can determine your level of reliability by choosing the number of times you duplicate the same block on several distributed disks.

Other storage start-ups in Belgium include:

HyperTrust (Leuven, born in 1999), secure storage applications over Internet, apparently in relation with Caringo, subsidiary of Telenet Holding NV since 2006

DataCenter Technologies (Lochristi, 2001), CAS, acquired by Veritas in 2005 for $58 million

NomaDesk (Ghent, 2004, cloud storage and file sharing software

Q-layer (Lochristi, 2005), software that combines server, networking and storage virtualization management on commodity hardware, acquired by Sun in in 2009
B-Virtual (Lochristi, 2008), RAID architecture for cloud storage service providers