Amplidata is a private company founded in Belgium in 2008 that since moved its HQ to Redwood City in California. It manufactures Storage Nodes operating in a sub-category of the storage market called Object Storage which does away with the traditional file system. These vendors compete in developing their own proprietary IP that provides addressing schemes and methods for storage and retrieval of data grouped into objects. Another research piece by us is about Caringo.
The Amplidata solution is called AmpliStor where a controller manages the Storage Node appliances in which the HDD disks are housed. The mechanism for storing and fetching objects is performed on the controller and called BitSpread which is key to the Amplidata IP.
The main benefits of the AmpliStor solution are its ability to scale, low capacity overhead, and suitability for unstructured data. Additionally Amplidata is marketing its offering as an alternative to traditional RAID-5/RAID-6 HDD protection. The problem with RAID is the time consuming rebuild times.
Amplidata and its Object Storage competitors are targeting workloads with cloud providers, archiving, and large scale unstructured data. The potential to cope with distributed resources is a further advantage in this segment.
Disk system vendors based on the model of a powerful central controller in front of a traditional file system will increasingly be challenged by Object Storage.
The key opportunities for disruption in storage are:
• cloud storage deployment
• hypervisors in storage and servers
• customer desire for smarter analytics (also called Big Data)
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