Object storage company Cloudian acquired Infinity Storage, a Milan, Italy-based firm whose founder pioneered software-defined file storage. Cloudian and Infinity began working together last summer, after being introduced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a mutual partner.
“HPE acted as a matchmaker,” said Jon Toor, chief marketing officer at Cloudian.
In December, the two companies launched their integrated SD-storage product called HyperFile. It uses Infinity’s file software built into Cloudian’s scalable object storage platform.
“Their flagship product is a file-based product, and ours is object-based storage,” Toor said. “We found their company was very synergistic with ours, so we decided to acquire them and make them a part of Cloudian.”
Cloudian won’t disclose the purchase price.
Infinity Storage
Infinity’s small staff (Toor said it’s about six employees) will stay in Milan, and the firm’s founder Caterina Falchi is now Cloudian’s VP of file technologies.
“Caterina founded the company about 20 years ago, and was really a pioneer in software-defined storage,” Toor said.
Falchi was an inventor of the write-once-read-many (WORM) file system that many of today’s SD-storage platform’s use, including Cloudian’s.
At the time, in the early 2000s, WORM provided jukebox file management and access to data within this protected environment. WORM was originally designed to preserve data integrity for regulatory compliance. Now it also plays a vital role in protecting data from corruption caused by malware or ransomware.
Looking ahead, Toor said Cloudian will continue to more tightly integrate the two file-based and object storage technologies, including adding metadata capabilities.
“Traditionally file storage has not incorporated rich metadata, and this is becoming an increasingly important part of the storage landscape, particularly in object storage,” Toor said. “So really combining our metadata capabilities so that you have rich metadata combined with files right out of the platform [allows customers to] really tag and retrieve information more quickly.”
Cloudian’s Latest Funding
The acquisition comes on the heels of Cloudian’s recent funding round.
Late last month Cloudian announced $25 million in venture funding, plus the formation of a joint venture with Digital Alpha to facilitate consumption-model financing for its scale-out enterprise storage platform. The joint venture includes a utility financing facility of up to $100 million from Digital Alpha and its Limited Partners.