Summer. The time for grilling, lazing on the beach, and topping up that tan. Sadly, were not that fortunate here at Byte and Switch towers, where the last few weeks have been spent trawling and poking our way through a fresh crop of storage startups.
Yes, thats right. Once again, we have readied a list of the storage startups we think are most watchable. Tech sector IPOs may be few and far between in these challenging economic times, but, as our latest list shows, there is no shortage of innovation going on in storageland.
Spanning the worlds of online backup, solid state disks (SSDs), 10Gbase-T, and even eco-friendly hosted storage, the latest up-and-comers are all touting new approaches to storing data. As storage managers wrestle with ever-expanding volumes of data and increasingly tight budgets, we have identified the startups that we think might just offer that extra something in the data center.
As many of the vendors on the list prove with their early customer traction, funding, and strategic partnerships, there is ample opportunity for innovative firms to get a foothold in the storage market, even while the macro-economic outlook remains bleak.
Some of the firms on our new list are already being touted as acquisition bait, whereas others are discussing their lofty IPO ambitions, so it will be interesting to see what the future holds for these startups.