10 data storage companies to watch

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Click to see: Picture of IOdrive

Company name: Fusion-io
Founded: June 2006
Location: Salt Lake City
What does the company offer? The ioDrive, a PCIe flash storage card that's inserted directly into servers. Fusion-io launched the product at Network World’s DEMO event last fall.
Why is it worth watching? Rivals like EMC say that attaching storage directly to servers can limit flexibility, but Fusion-io promises a great price/performance ratio, with the PCIe card delivering 100,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). A 160Gb card and the 320Gb card go for $4,800 and $8,900, respectively. Analyst Deni Connor calls it "a good approach for giving new life to servers . . . running transaction-intensive operations."
How did the company get its start? CTO David Flynn and marketing vice president Rick White were having discussions about embedded devices and decided that there was a market for embedded storage that takes advantage of the speed of flash memory.
How did the company get its name? The name contains "fusion" because the ioDrive fuses CPU and RAM into a single silicon-based device, and "io" because of its speed.
CEO and background: Donald Basile has worked in the data networking, cable, telecommunications, computing and semiconductor industries. Most recently, he spent four years as vice president and managing director of investment firm Raza Foundries.
Funding: $19 million in a funding round led by New Enterprise Associates.
Who's using the product? 44% of Fortune 100 companies use the ioDrive, the vendor says.

Company name: Nirvanix
Founded: July 2007
Location: San Diego
What does the company offer? The Storage Delivery Network, a cloud storage platform providing highly scalable storage capacity over the Web, optimized for digital media and large files. The service became available last October.
Why is it worth watching? Along with Amazon's Simple Storage Service, Nirvanix is one of the first players in the emerging cloud storage market. While Amazon's maximum allowed file size is 5GB, Nirvanix lets customers store files as large as 256GB.
How did the company get its start? Founders Patrick Harr and Geoff Tudor, who have experience in storage, networking and media caching, wanted to develop an alternative to content delivery networks.
How did the company get its name? It's a play on words combining Nirvana and media exchange, using the "I" in media and "X" in exchange.
CEO and background: Harr has a background in marketing and previously worked at Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, focusing on investments in content, storage and media services.
Funding: $18 million from Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures, Windward Ventures and European Founders Fund.
Who's using the product? Content publishing Web sites, businesses looking for data backup and operators of Web 2.0 applications. One customer, FreeDrive, uses Nirvanix to provide an online storage service that is integrated with Facebook and makes it easy for friends to share files.