Updated Storage Platform Leverages Metadata

Venture capital keeps flowing into the big data sector as a seemingly never-ending line of analytics startups roll out data management and other platforms designed to scale to petabytes and beyond.

Case in point is Primary Data, a Silicon Valley startup that just announced a $40 million funding round along with the latest release of its automated data management platform. The company said Wednesday (Aug. 2) its latest round included a $20 million investment along with another $20 million line of credit.

Pelion Venture Partners, Accel and Battery Ventures led the round along with strategic investors from previous rounds. Primary Data said it would use its latest cash infusion to support the latest release of its DataSphere metadata engine software.

The startup based on Los Altos, Calif., also announced a string of partnership with Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN), Cloudian , Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), data storage and network provider NetApp, (NASDAQ: NTAP), Scality and (VMware NYSE: VMW).

Launched by David Flynn and Rick White, the original founders of storage vendor Fusion-io, Primary Data emerged from stealth mode in 2014 with its software-defined datacenter technologies. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joined Primary Data late that year as its chief scientist.

The company’s metadata engine is designed to help automate how big data scaling to the cloud is managed across different storage systems.

The latest version of the DataSphere platform incorporates machine learning with data management to move “the right data to the right place at the right time” without affecting application performance, the company said.

The integration of machine learning with data management involves the collection of metadata on data access while measuring performance metrics like latency, bandwidth and storage availability. Data analytics are then applied against the metadata with the goal of matching storage and other requirements for performance, cost and reliability.

The platform’s namespace is intended to make different storage platforms simultaneously available to applications without degrading performance across flash, network-attached or cloud-based storage systems, the company claims.

“The days of manual data management are coming to an end,” Primary Data CEO Lance Smith asserted on a statement. “As data volumes scale out and up into the cloud, enterprises are looking for a way to intelligently manage and automate how data is managed across different storage systems.”

Added Wozniak: “When technology is complex, it often means we need to figure out a better solution to the problem.” The updated data virtualization platform is designed to make it “simple for enterprises to finally automate how data is managed by using the intelligence that has been sitting right there in your metadata all along.”

DataSphere 2.0 is available now from Primary Data or its reseller partners.

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