At the most recent edition of the IT Press Tour in Tel Aviv, Information Age met up with eight Israeli start-ups that are disrupting IT infrastructure and data management
8 Israeli start-ups disrupting how you think about data
This article will round up the eight Israeli start-ups that featured in the 43rd edition of the IT Press Tour in Tel Aviv. Taking place between the 3rd-7th April, the conference featured presentations from an array of start-ups looking to revolutionise data storage.
Read on to find out more about CTERA, Data Dynamics, HYCU, Infinidat, Komodor, Model9, Pliops and Speedb.
CTERA
Cloud file storage provider CTERA offers edge-to-cloud services with an array of accessibility options, allowing users to access files any time, anywhere. Looking to facilitate a DevOps culture that balances data innovation and security, CTERA describes its services as ‘enterprise IT working like a startup’.
Recognised by HPE and GigaOm for its edge-to-cloud and distributed cloud file storage capabilities respectively, the Series D-funded company provides customers with a file system featuring deduplication, encryption and disaster recovery. Users can leverage the cloud of their choice, with APIs providing intercompany interoperability, while analytics, auditing and compliance allow for innovation in line with data regulations.
Data Dynamics
Data Dynamics is a software platform provider that helps companies get the best out of rising data, allowing for leverage of unified management with compliance in mind. Founded in 2012, Data Dynamics offers lifesycle management and analytics through its StorageX product, while Insight Analytix brings AI and ML capabilities, and ControlX offers risk management.
With use of a variety of products for data management leading to wasted time and resources for organisations, this company provides a unified platform for unstructured data, catering for 25% of the Fortune 100.
HYCU
A multi-cloud data protection company, HYCU (standing for Hybrid Cloud Up Time) is backed by the largest sum of investment in Bain Capital Ventures history: $87.5 million. With a steadily growing customer base, the organisation looks to offer data protection over public cloud, with a single pane view of all clouds available to the user.
HYCU Protégé offers application-aware cross-cloud and disaster recovery capabilties, aimed at mid-market organisations. Once on-premise data is moved to the cloud, users can keep data protected across both domains. Having begun with a Nutanix-only solution, Protégé is now compatible with the big three cloud service providers (CSPs): AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Related: Maximising control of multi-cloud data protection — During the most recent edition of the IT Press Tour in Tel Aviv, multi-cloud data protection startup HYCU announced updates to its portfolio.
Infinidat
Infinidat is a data management vendor that helps its customers build a data centre that suits their needs. Founded in 2011 and led by CEO Phil Bullinger since January 2021, its enterprise data and cloud solutions are provided in the form of one core architecture for multiple workloads, including Oracle and VMWare. Along with this, users can leverage SaaS AIOps and data protection capabilities.
The organisation’s product portfolio has expanded in recent times, having began with its flagship Infinibox before adding data protection product InfiniGuard and higher performance storage Infinibox SSA, in 2018 and 2021 respectively. Its customer base of Global 2000 companies has also grown over the past five financial quarters, with pharmaceuticals, healthcare and telecoms sectors being particularly fruitful domains.
Komodor
Komodor is a troubleshooting startup specialising in Kubernetes. With Kubernetes still being an emerging technology with much research still to be carried out to drive value, Komodor’s interface investigates the applications being used by developers in order to find errors to be fixed. From here, solutions are suggested to the user around fixing the problem, taking into account the case-by-case needs of its clients.
The Series A startup provides a single view of the user’s application setup, setting out problems on one screen, eradicating the need to go from app to app to find potential issues. In addition, Komodor looks to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR), helping developers devote more time to innovation.
Model9
Mainframe data management company Model9 is focused on helping its clients migrate mainframe data to cloud workloads, and take advantage of hybrid cloud models. Established in 2016, Model9 is backed by Intel Capital, StageOne, North First and Glenrock Israel.
Having secured partnerships with AWS and Azure, the startup helps customers unlock the value of mission-critical secondary data. For Model9, this entails taking into account the high demand for cloud migration and capabilities as well as the importance of data generated by mainframes, which according to IBM makes up almost 80% of the world’s business data.
Related: Reimagining mainframe data in the cloud — During the most recent IT Press Tour in Tel Aviv, Model9 discussed how it is reimagining mainframe data management in the cloud.
Pliops
Aiming to become the “NVIDIA of storage”, Pliops offers its Extreme Data Processor (XDP), for scaling databases, analytics, AI and ML, among other capabilities. Backed by NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Capital, SoftBank and Western Digital, Pliops provides customers with a PCIe card that can increase performance, reliability, capacity, and efficiency.
With data centre processing being a top focus for organisations, Pliops looks to meet demand for uncompromised growth where many CPUs can’t, while graphic processing units (GPU) have the tendency of sitting idle for long periods of time. The company boasts a customer base including a top five SaaS vendor, top five IaaS hyperscaler, and cryptocurrency companies.
Related: Overcoming the chip shortage with extreme data processing — During the most recent edition of the IT Press Tour in Tel Aviv, Pliops explained how it is helping its customers overcome chip shortages and scaling issues with extreme data processing.
Speedb
Speedb is a next-generation data engine provider that was birthed in November 2020 as a result of dissatisfaction around the scalability of RocksDB, notably deployed by Facebook. To capitalise on this gap in the market, the deeptech startup set up a proprietary key value storage (KVS) product that acts as a drop-in RocksDB replacement and allows for data management at scale, without sharding fees that can come with either new hardware or cloud infrastructure.
Users of this data engine can operate on a single instance, which eliminates the need for sharding, while compaction capabilities for ever rising levels of company data reduces write amplification. Use cases being explored by Speedb range from key-value-store and event streaming on the BSV side, to microservices and a metadata store for B2B.
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