Global Brain Invests in IzumoBASE

The GB-V Growth Fund Investment Limited Partnership managed by Global Brain Corporation, has invested in IzumoBASE, Inc., in next generation software-defined storage.

In the past years, with the accelerated expansion of big data and cloud computing, demand for more powerful, scalable and flexible storage solution has been stronger. It became apparent that traditional hardware-based storage solutions could not meet such demand, and software-defined storage has begun to emerge as the next generation storage solution.

IzumoBASE develops and licenses IzumoFS, the next generation software-defined storage. It can be installed on any commoditized servers, and instantly works as complete storage solution with greater performance, scalability and flexibility, which could not be achieved by hardware-based products. In addition, the company also provides features including multi-protocol support (1) and inline de-duplication (2), which are not supported by solutions commonly available in the market. In this sense, IzumoFS provides greater performance compared to the first generations of software-defined storage and is the first SDS that is able to replace and outperform hardware-based solutions.

“IzumoFS has a good chance to dominate the storage market globally,” said Jiro Kumakura, partner, Global Brain. “Even the giant hardware vendors in the market are moving into the space of software-defined storage, but their move doesn’t seem very fast. IzumoFS is the best alternative solution available for the customers who are seriously dea,g with big data and cloud computing. Therefore, the question is not ‘if’ but ‘how fast’ it can penetrate the market.”

“We strongly believe that IzumoFS can tackle difficulties remaining in the current hardware-based solutions,” said Tetsuo Saito, senior corporate officer and GM, support services of UNIADEX, Ltd. “UNIADEX is a one stop solution and cloud provider for system development, operation and maintenance with a wide range of partnership with various technology vendors. Based on that knowledge and eperience we believe IzumoFS will bringthe next level of performance and capabilities that will further accelerate the movement of cloud computing. We are excited to provide enterprise 24/7 support for IzumoFS so that the high performance of IzumoFS can be delivered to as many customers as possible.”

With this investment, the company will complete the development of next major release of IzumoFS, and move its global expansion plan forward.

IzumoBASE was founded in April 2012 by Dr. Jumpei Arakawa, who dedicated 8 years to the research of distributed file system in the University of Tokyo. The current software is the 5th generation, and the former version has a track record of being adopted by telecommunication company to be used as a backend of live petabyte-class cloud service for enterprises.

(1) Multiple Protocol Support: IzumoFS can be deployed and utilized as both file storage and block storage, through the support of three major protocols: CIFS, NFS and iSCSI.

(2) Inline de-duplication: De-duplication is a technology for reducing the amount of storage usage by eliminating redundant data. It processes it on real-time, on-the-fly basis, with only a few percentage overhead.