software-defined-storage
(10)
The Layer Between Your Database and the Cloud Bill
Kaminario spent a decade selling flash arrays. Then it threw out the hardware, kept the software, and bet the company on a single idea: that the cloud is fast enough for anything - if you put the right layer in front of it.
StorONE
StorONE is a New York-based enterprise storage software company founded in 2011 by Gal Naor and Raz Gordon. Its ONE Storage Platform separates storage services from hardware, delivering block, file and object storage from a single, hardware-agnostic engine. By rewriting the storage stack from scratch, StorONE combines high performance, real-time auto-tiering across flash and HDD, immutable-snapshot ransomware recovery and per-drive licensing to help enterprises cut storage costs while running on commodity servers.
Gal Naor
Gal Naor is the co-founder and CEO of StorONE, a New York based enterprise storage company built on the idea that software, not more hardware, is the real bottleneck in data storage. He first made his mark in 2004 as co-founder of Storwize, which pioneered real-time enterprise storage compression and was acquired by IBM in 2010 for $140 million. Naor spent roughly six years and dozens of patents building StorONE's unified S1 storage engine, which provisions block, file and object storage from the same commodity drives at a fraction of legacy cost. He is known for a contrarian, efficiency-first philosophy and for steering StorONE to cash-flow positivity with an eye toward an eventual IPO.
Graid Technology Inc.
Graid Technology is a Silicon Valley and Taiwan storage startup that builds SupremeRAID, the first GPU-based RAID solution for NVMe and NVMe-over-Fabrics SSDs. By moving RAID processing off the CPU and onto an NVIDIA GPU sitting out of the data path, the company unlocks the full performance of modern flash-delivering millions of IOPS and tens of gigabytes per second of throughput-while protecting data for AI, HPC, cloud, and enterprise workloads.
Quobyte
Quobyte is a software company that turns commodity x86 or ARM servers into a unified, high-performance, software-defined storage system spanning file, block, and object interfaces. Founded in 2013 by two ex-Google engineers who previously built the open-source XtreemFS parallel file system, Quobyte applies hyperscaler design principles - resilient software rather than exotic hardware - to enterprise, HPC, and AI storage. Its Data Center File System combines NVMe and HDD tiers in one architecture and is used by organizations including Siemens Healthineers, robotaxi maker Zoox, the UK's STFC/JASMIN supercomputer, and Yahoo Japan.
Sihua Technologies Inc
Sihua Technologies Inc is a Cupertino, California enterprise-infrastructure software company that helps organizations build private and hybrid clouds inside their own data centers. Its software-defined stack - the ExpressVM virtualization engine, the MegaBric hyper-converged storage suite, and the XOS operating layer - collapses compute, virtualization, and storage onto standard x86 servers, aiming for enterprise-class performance and high availability without the price of proprietary appliances. Founded in 2000 and paired with its Shanghai-based sibling company KXTech, Sihua also ships media-streaming (XView) and AI data-acceleration (NeuADC) products for telecom and enterprise customers.
StoneFly, Inc.
StoneFly, Inc. is a Castro Valley, California enterprise storage company founded in 1996 that helped turn iSCSI into an industry standard - it registered iSCSI.com in March 1996 and shipped one of the first iSCSI storage appliances in 2002. Today it builds NAS, SAN, unified scale-out (USO), backup and disaster-recovery appliances, and cloud storage, all powered by its patented StoneFusion operating system and Air-Gapped Vault immutable, ransomware-resistant technology. A subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory (DNF), StoneFly serves 10,000+ customers from SMBs to Fortune 500 and government - including deployments aboard US Navy Littoral Combat Ships and Virginia-class submarines.
Nimbus Data
Nimbus Data is a privately held, largely self-funded American flash storage company founded in 2003 by Thomas Isakovich. It designs all-flash arrays and solid state drives - most famously the ExaDrive DC100, the 100-terabyte SSD it introduced in 2018 that remained the world's largest for years. Rather than chase venture money, the company built a profitable business selling high-capacity, power-efficient storage to enterprises, cloud providers, and AI and edge workloads, backed by its HALO/AFX software and a flat-rate support model.
Nutanix
Nutanix is a San Jose-based enterprise cloud software company that pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), collapsing servers, storage, virtualization and networking into a single software layer that runs the same way in a private data center, at the edge, or in the public cloud. Its platform lets IT teams run virtual machines, containers, databases and AI workloads across clouds without the operational sprawl of traditional three-tier architecture. Now a public company (NASDAQ: NTNX) with more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue and roughly 7,000+ employees, Nutanix competes head-on with VMware as enterprises rethink their virtualization stack.
Leander Yu
Leander Yu is the founder and CEO of Graid Technology Inc., a Sunnyvale-based startup that invented the world's first GPU-accelerated RAID solution for NVMe SSDs - SupremeRAID. With over 25 years in the storage industry and a prior successful exit (Bigtera to Silicon Motion in 2017), Yu built Graid in 2019 to solve a fundamental bottleneck: traditional RAID controllers can't keep up with modern NVMe speeds. By offloading RAID computation to a GPU, SupremeRAID delivers up to 28 million IOPS and 260GB/s throughput from a single card. The company raised a $30M Series B in March 2025 led by Foxconn and CTBC joint venture, and signed a landmark licensing deal with Intel for VROC technology in late 2025.