Content delivery player Akamai has agreed to buy Kubernetes storage startup Ondat.
Akamai Technologies has a massively distributed Connected Cloud offering for cloud computing, security, and content delivery. It provides services for developers to build, run, and secure high performance workloads close to where its business users connect online. Akamai is adding core and distributed sites on top of the underlying backbone that powers its existing edge network. This spans more than 4,100 locations across 134 countries. The network megalith aims to place compute, storage, database, and other services close to large population, industry, and IT centers.
Adam Karon, Akamai’s COO and cloud technology group GM, said: “Storage is a key component of cloud computing and Ondat’s technology will enhance Akamai’s storage capabilities, allowing us to offer a fundamentally different approach to cloud that integrates core and distributed computing sites with a massively scaled edge network.”
Ondat’s employees, including founder and CTO Alex Chircop, will join Akamai’s cloud computing business. No acquisition price information was provided.
Ondat recently partnered with CloudCasa, which provides containerized application backup. Sathya Sankaran, founder and GM of CloudCasa, said: “The acquisition of Ondat by Akamai is another indication that Kubernetes is entering the mainstream for enterprises deploying stateful business applications on Kubernetes environments in public clouds.”
In his view: “Ondat fills the distributed storage management gap in the Linode Kubernetes Environment (LKE) for the Akamai Connected Cloud. The best-of-breed CloudCasa and Ondat offering provides Akamai customers with a unified solution to run their stateful applications on Kubernetes without worrying about availability, performance, protection, or data management and recovery. Akamai Connected Cloud customers will now be able to migrate their Kubernetes applications and data from on-premises environments and alternative public clouds to LKE.”
Ondat was founded as StorageOS in 2015 by original CEO Chris Brandon in New York, along with CTO and one-time CEO Alex Chircop and VP Engineering Simon Croome in the UK. It raised $2 million seed funding and then went through an $8 million A-round in 2018 and a $10 million B-round in 2021 – $20 million in total. Brandon resigned to join Amazon in 2019.
The Ondat name was adopted in October 2021. Croome left in November 2021 and later joined the Microsoft Azure storage team. Richard Olver, who joined Ondat as COO in May 2021, became the CEO in September last year, after Ondat went through a layoff exercise in July, under tough business conditions.
Robin.io, another Kubernetes storage startup, was acquired by Japan’s Rakuten Symphony in March 2022. Pure Storage acquired Portworx, a third Kubernetes storage startup, in September 2020.
