Chinese Storage Start-Up Discovered: Sandstone, Just Raising $21 Million
In massive object storage and unified storage platform
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on July 10, 2020 at 2:25 pmFirm:
Shanyan Data Technology Co., Ltd. (Sandstone)
Location:
HQs in Shenzhen, China and 15 offices in country with a nationwide service network
Date founded:
2014
Financial funding:
4 rounds totaling more than RMB170 million
- angel round financing from Shanghai Phegda in 2015
- RMB10 million in 2016
- series A financing of Shunwei Capital lead-investment in 2017
- series B in 2019 led by GF Qianhe lead-investment and Shenzhen Talent Fund co-investment
- RMB160 million ($21.37 million) series B+ in 2020 led by Chinese large-scale state-owned enterprise COSCO Shipping Development, with participation from Xianghe Capital and Wuxi Capital.
Founder and CEO:
Chen Jian
Technology
Massive object storage and unified storage platform
Participated in the establishment of Cloud Computing National Standards GB/T 37732 (released in 2019).
30 invention patents and software copyrights
Products ranked top in the global consultancy IDC rankings, including object storage in the 2nd place (15.1%) and block storage in the 4th place (7.1%).
Two products:
1/ Unified storage platform (USP)
It’s as a SDS system that can provide block and file storage services, support various database workloads, virtualization applications and cloud native applications. So far, bimodal IT has become the new normal of enterprise IT; the elastic software-defined architecture enables USP support a range of multi-virtualized scenarios, and also integrated with the ecosystem of mainstream container platforms, so it can provide applications with high-performance snapshot, cross-data-center disaster recovery and other enterprise-level storage services. This software system can be deployed in a general server, able to constantly update the hardware so that the system could always be kept in the best state and could quickly respond to the requirements of complex and dynamic business in the future.
Click to enlarge
2/ Intelligent object storage product (MOS)
It’s an object storage product competent in enterprise-level storage and intelligent retrieval capability. The new generation of storage engines has built a cross-regional storage architecture based on standard commercial server, which can be linearly expanded and has almost no limit to the maximum capacity. Besides, while providing reliability and availability, it has integrated the capabilities for data intelligent processing and analysis, simplified the infrastructure needed for massive data processing, and thus improving the efficiency of data processing. USP organizes the HDDs and SSD in commercial servers into exabyte-level large-scale storage resource pools through distributed technology to provide standard service interfaces for enterprise applications, solve the imbalanced resource utilization caused by island storage systems in traditional data centers and enable the storage resources to provide on-demand service. Furthermore, it can support small and medium-sized deployment with controllable cost and also expand horizontally to large-scale storage clusters with thousands of nodes, so as to replace the existing centralized storage facilities in the middle end and support various business applications accordingly.
Click to enlarge
Released dates:
2015 for unified storage platform
2016 for intelligent object storage product
Applications:
Commercial deployment in around 10 industries, supporting approximately 20 different types of application scenarios such as private cloud, hybrid cloud, finance technology, smart government, smart medical care, smart transportation and smart security.
Customers:
Include GF Securites, CGNPC, China Mobile OneNet, Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau Co., Ltd, Wuhan University, CDN Light
Target market:
Financial middle-end, financial imaging, private cloud storage, medical private cloud
Comments
Sandstone is one of the rare Chinese start-up involved in storage software.
We have recorded 11 storage start-ups in the country: one died (HDD manufacturer GS Magicstor many years ago), one sold (Kanbox, acquired by Alibaba), all the other ones in hardware.
The exception is XSKY, in distributed block storage solution for enterprises and carrier grade SDS product for cloud service providers and private cloud customers, getting RMB320 million in D-round led by China's State Owned Capital Venture Capital Fund.
Comments from Philippe Nicolas:
Described above, Sandstone promotes USP and MOS, respectively an unified storage platform and an object storage solution.
We understand that USP is based on Ceph as clearly the solution exposes the RBD protocol. RBD means RADOS Block Device and exposes a block interface. RADOS stands for Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store. Therefore USP has 2 kinds of competition. First, the product navigates with other Ceph-based solutions such SoftIron, IBM of course and also several others like HPE. Second, outside the Ceph ecosystem, we find Dell EMC, NetApp, Infinidat and Pavilion Data Systems.
MOS is the portion of Ceph limited to object exposing S3 and Swift protocols. For object, it's interesting to split competition with open source vs. proprietary solutions. With that, it competes with a ton of products powered by Ceph, but also open source solutions like MinIO or ones based on Swift like Nvidia/SwiftStack. As an update Nvidia doesn't mention at all SwiftStack on their website and some team members joined Nvidia, others left of course. A real mysterious acquisition before the bankrupt finally... And of course, outside of Ceph, the product lives in an ecosystem with more than 20 object storage vendors including IBM, Cloudian, Hitachi Vantara, Quantum, Pure Storage, Dell EMC, Caringo, Vast Data, Cohesity or Commvault.
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