Datacore has bought the object storage supplier Caringo for an undisclosed amount and will now offer software-defined block, file and object storage.
Caringo customers include BT Television, Department of Defense, Disney Streaming Services, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Argonne National Labs, and hundreds more worldwide. The company took in $33m in funding, including $8.8m in its last round in 2016.
Its acquisition shows that endgame is nearing for object storage software vendor consolidation. Today three independent object storage startups are still standing. Cloudian, Minio and Scality. Othe contenders – Amplidata, Archivas, ByCast, Ceph, Cleversafe, Evertrust, FilePool, OpenIO and others have all been acquired.
Dave Zabrowski, CEO of DataCore Software, said: “With our acquisition of Caringo, we are excited to offer a proven, highly reliable object storage technology with an unmatched breadth of features to IT departments, service providers, and government customers worldwide.”
Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Partners – a VC backer of DataCore – was also active on the quote front: “We are excited DataCore is adding leading object storage technology from Caringo to become the vendor with the most comprehensive software-defined portfolio in the industry.”
Caringo’s Swarm object storage software joins DataCore’s vFilo file and SanSymphony block storage software portfolio. Datacore believes strongly in a best-of-breed approach for file, block and object software, rejecting Ceph-style one-product-does-it-all approaches, and also unified file+object stores.
CMO Gerardo Dada told us that optimisations for file make a unified product poor at object performance and vice versa.
Caringo supplies Swarm in appliance and software form. Version 11 Swarm was announced in September last year and introduced large file bulk uploads, partial file restore, file sharing and backup to AWS S3-format targets.
Swarm 12 in November 2020 added distributed protection, immediate content access across geographically dispersed sites, single sign-on (SSO) support, and support for S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Dense storage and flash drives were also supported.
Dada said 95 per cent of Austin-based Caringo’s staff are joining DataCore, which also has an Austin office. The Caringo CEO, Tony Barbagallo will be a DataCore advisor for a while.
DataCore said it had a strong close to 2020 with double-digit growth Y/Y in capacity sold. The company claims it is consistently adding more than 100 new customers per quarter.
