It’s not often that two competing startups in a specific industry close funding rounds on the same day. Data centers and Big Data, specifically the storage of that data, are a growing need for companies today. Two startups that offer technology to help those companies manage their data centers closed their respective financing rounds earlier this week. With the ever-increasing flood of data from mobile devices and social media, companies are having to create processes for analyzing that data. Storage has to get smarter.

Both companies received $20 million in their funding round bringing their collective totals respectively to:

• PernixData Inc. – $27 million
• Atlantis Computing Inc. – $35 million (Corrected by editor)

Storage performance of mobile device and social media data is becoming imperative to companies. The real-time analyzing of that data, along with the short and long term financial implications, is not something they can turn the other cheek to. PernixData and Atlantis Computing both make software that aims to improve performance of storage, technology, and applications. The software addresses the immediate demand for storage capacity and data processing speeds needed for the current web.

Research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) released a Big Data Drives Big Demand for Storage release last month. In the release they announced two recently published in-depth studies: Storage for Big Data: Insight Into Usage Patterns (IDC #240372), and Influencers in Deployment of Storage for Big Data (IDC #240451). )We’ll cover both of these in-depth next week.) Here are a couple important takeaways from the release:

• Storage is a critical piece of the infrastructure component, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53 percent
• Revenue from storage consumed by BD&A environments will increase from a mere $379.9 million in 2011 to nearly $6 billion in 2016 between 2011 and 2016.

PernixData Inc. 

 
PernixData provides software to virtualize server-side flash memory. The problem is, putting fast storage right next to the compute nodes, while it speeds things up, is not very virtualization friendly. The companies co-founders are VMware alumni, so virtualization is something they know very, very well. Flash storage is faster than disk storage. Flash allows customers to keep data in-memory, which allows for quicker data analysis. However there is a drawback, Flash storage is more expensive than disk storage. Enters PernixData, who’s software helps address the cost issue through Flash storage virtualization.

Altantis Computing Inc.

 
Atlantis Computing’s software improves storage and application performance for virtualized workloads. By reducing the amount of storage consumed, optimizing shared storage, boosting performance, and reducing operationalization, Atlantis ILIO delivers working deployments faster. By running Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as persistent storage directly in-memory, it is significantly faster and it eliminates the problems that often come up in communication between storage and VDI administrators.

PernixData’s and Atlantis’ approaches to improving data storage with virtualization are different. However, both offer the CIO with software that can significantly reduce the short-term cost of purchasing additional storage appliances, and the long-term cost of building and/or maintaining them. In essence, both offer a solution to more effectively use storage and allow managing that storage as easy as pressing a button.