Say a stealthy 'hi' to Gluent, Tachyum and VAST Data

Analysis Three storage startups have hoved into view: Gluent, Tachyum and VAST Data.

Gluent is a data silo virtualiser, liking RDBMS to Hadoop data for easier and simpler data analysis. Tachyum aims to, it appears, defeat Moore's Law by devising a new data processing architecture, and VAST Data, the stealthiest of the three, must be operating in the Really Really Big Data area.

Gluent

Dallas-based Gluent has been set up to "liberate" enterprise data. It talks about extracting it from transactional database, enterprise data warehouse, and specialty data mart silos, with complex ETL procedures, offloading it to Hadoop with the Gluent Data Platform and so gaining the freedom to use it however and whenever customers want – wonderful. (Ed: You're sounding a bit jaded there, Mr Mellor).

Its software technology provides a data virtualisation layer between traditional databases, cloud storage and Hadoop. The company claims customers can preserve their investments in RDBMS platforms while leveraging the power, scalability, and elasticity of private and public-based clouds via its Data Platform.

Gluent's webpage blurb says: "With Gluent Smart Connector, the databases of origin won't even know the data is gone. Your existing applications run as they always have, without code changes. What's more, with Gluent Present you can enrich data in existing databases with data that may exist only in Hadoop." Actually, this sounds pretty good.

It was founded by CEO Tanel Poder, ex-director of research and development at the Accenture Enkitec Group, Accenture having acquired Enkitec in March 2014.

In September last year, Gluent announced the availability of data offload support for both Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata, on top of its Oracle starting support, and claimed applications can query data that was originated in Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata straight in an Oracle Database.

We have no information on Gluent's funding. Poder's on Twittter as @TanelPoder.

Tachyum

The Skyera boys are back in town with Tachyum, a startup launched to "solve the problem of declining rates of processing technology advancement, performance, density, and cost improvements which have all hit plateaux." Global competitors are catching up with the USA and Tachyum says the US lead in nanometer-class chips and the systems they power can only be re-established by creating a new intelligent data processing architecture.

There are four hot-shot co-founders:

• CEO Dr Radoslav "Rado" Danilak, co-founder and CEO of Skyera, a supplier of ultra-dense solid-state storage systems, bought by WD in a a non-material acquisition in 2014, which we think cost it $100m to $165m – not a golden exit we understand. Danilak was co-founder and CTO of SandForce, acquired by LSI in 2011 for $377m, before Skyera.
• VP business development Ken Wagner, co-founder of machine learning company Wave Computing, chip synthesis tools company Silicon Analytics, and Theseus Logic, a clock-less logic company.
• VP software engineering Igor Shevlyakov, who led the performance aspects of the flash-translation layer at Skyera and led compiler and system tools development at MicroUnity before that.
• Chief hardware architect Rod Mullendore who architected and implemented ASIC and FPGA-based flash controllers at Skyera. He was chief architect for the flash controller chips at SandForce, and he was a member of the founding team of Nishan Systems, which developed Storage over IP.

Tachyum has created, or will create, proprietary computational mechanisms specifically to unlock the performance of nanometer-size devices and deliver "unprecedented speed, power, and cost to solve the most complex problems in the cloud, big data, deep learning, mobile devices, autonomous systems, and large-scale computing."

Our understanding is that Tachyum is concentrating on hardware, specifically controllers anf the firmware that runs them, with FPGA/ASIC work involved. Is this SandForce round 2? The company has received some seed funding and it is very early days.

VAST Data

Israel-based VAST Data has been founded by Renen Hallak and is focused on on big data and cloud storage. Hallak was a CTO at XtremIO and has filed 17 patents. He says he led the architecture and development of XtremIo's all flash array.

CTERA marketing boss Jeff Denworth has joined as Product Management VP, and Shachar Fienblit, who was Kaminario's CTO, has joined as VP for Research and Development. These are two high profile hires.

Like Tachyum, VAST Data is operating in stealth mode and we have no information about funding and product direction. Alon Horev is a senior software engineer at VAST and LinkedIn lists a few more software engineers there, but no hardware people. ®