OpenIO Secures $5 Million in VC Funding

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OpenIO, an object storage and serverless computing startup based in France, announced today that it had raised $5 million in a round of financing headed by Elaia Partners, Partech Ventures and Nord France Amorçage.

The company, which has offices San Francisco, Tokyo and the French cities of Lille and Paris, produces open source object storage software called OpenIO SDS and a serverless computing framework that allows organizations to run applications directly on their storage infrastructures where data resides.

OpenIO provides aggregated capacity from x86 servers and can ultimately scale to over an exabyte of storage and hundreds of billions of objects, according to the startup. Powered by the company’s “Conscience” technology, OpenIO enables dynamic load balancing that surpasses the performance limitations of traditional object stores and supports heterogenous clusters comprised of old and new hardware.

“Each server collects its own metrics, sends them to a distributed service, called Conscience, which computes a quality score and publishes these scores on a bulletin available to all the servers of the infrastructure: the grid of nodes,” wrote Enrico Signoretti, head of product strategy at OpenIO, in a blog post explaining the technology. “This is done every few seconds, asynchronously, so each node always knows the state of all other nodes. Each micro decision on where to place data is done using the best available nodes with the highest scores.”

And OpenIO SDS is easy on the system requirements. The software can run on single CPU core devices with as little as 512MB of RAM, allowing for deployments that range from data centers to remote embedded devices.

“Huge amounts of data are produced and consumed every day, and the IT industry is experiencing a major revolution,” said OpenIO CEO and cofounder Laurent Denel in an Oct. 24 announcement. “Big data, IoT and machine learning applications are driving this transformation. At OpenIO, as we have solved the storage problem of massive amounts of data, and while much of the industry focuses on lower $/GB, we help businesses to create more value from their data.”

OpenIO isn’t the data storage company to rake in funds this month.

On Oct. 3, Infinidat announced it had raised $95 million in a Series C round of financing. The company, among the firms listed in Enterprise Storage Forum’s Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Buying Guide, has raised $325 million and has shipped more than two exabytes of InfiniBox storage, Infinidat’s flagship offering.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.