The French Startup OpenIO has just raised $ 5 Million from Elaia Partners, Partech Ventures and Nord France Amorçage. The company is focused on the technology of storing objects for different types of infrastructure.
With the fundraising of today, the company plans to recruit new customers in the United States and Japan, in addition to the EMEA region.
Storing objects is a different way of thinking about storage. Instead of thinking about hard disks, free space, and total size, you abstract your storage layer to think of objects that you store in an unstructured way. In this way, Twitter engineers do not have to think about the location of a photo as long as they have the ID of the photo and that they can retrieve it when they need it.
Companies like Amazon and Google have developed popular cloud object storage services with Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage. But the public cloud is not always the solution. Some companies want to manage their data internally, others want to store data from the end customer.
OpenIO has built an open source framework to allow you to turn any computer device into a backend of your own object storage service. It even runs on a cheap virtual private server with 512 MB of RAM.
And it is evolving pretty well because some customers are using OpenIO with several petabytes of data – a petabyte of 1000 terabytes. Dailymotion video streaming site uses it. Companies can mix different types of material. For example, you can create a single data cluster with powerful x86 servers and energy-efficient ARMv7 devices working together.
This is the key to understanding the future of OpenIO. Managing a ton of data in a large data center is not that difficult. But latency and bandwidth are becoming critical resources as files grow and connected devices produce more data points than ever before. Your Amazon Echo and your city's security cameras should be able to store data and make it accessible from those devices instead of sending everything to a data center.
That's why a solution like OpenIO could be interesting when it comes to advanced computing and fog. It could become the storage layer that takes advantage of all those unused resources in the devices around you.