European cloud service provider OVHcloud has bought OpenIO, a French provider of fast object storage.
OpenIO was started up in 2015 and has bagged about $5m or so of funding There were eight founders, led by CEO Laurent Denel. Its highly-scalable and open source object storage software is hardware supplier-agnostic. Today the company has 30-plus employees and more than 40 customers.
Denel said in prepared remarks: “All of the technologies used to build our Object Storage solution are and will continue to be open-sourced, which is an essential common value for both OVHcloud and OpenIO. More than that, it will be extended and enriched by our combined talents.”
He told Blocks & Files: “OVHcloud’s acquisition of OpenIO comes at a time when performance has become a key consideration for a storage solution. Companies today want the benefits of trusted cloud storage, to regain control of their data and streamline costs – which are rising due the unpredictable pricing models offered by hyperscalers.”
Denel said: “The OpenIO brand will disappear, but the project continues. And it will grow, taking advantage of OVHcloud’s know-how to industrialise it.”
OVHcloud was founded in Roubaix, France, in 1999 by chairman Octave Klaba The hosting firm operates 400,000 servers in its own 30 data centres across four continents, and claims in excess of 1.5 million customers in more than 130 countries.
Michel Paulin, OVHcloud cloud CEO, issued a quote: “With the global volume of data doubling every 18 months, we are aware that storage issues are at the heart of the concerns of our 1.5 million customers. With the acquisition of OpenIO, we aim to create a highly scalable offering, benefiting from the best infrastructure and one of the most attractive prices in the market.”
OVH aims to build a European alternative to US public cloud offerings, with European data sovereignty rules respected.
OVH says that the combination of OpenIO software with its industrial and cloud infrastructure expertise will enable the design of a very large-scale object storage offering at the best price performance ratio. Both companies are European and open source in approach. Both have contributed to development of the Swift open source project which offers object storage as part of the Openstack foundation.
OpenIO’s workforce will join with the OVHcloud teams in Roubaix, Paris and internationally. The financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed.
