History repeats itself rather often in the world of enterprise storage. Every few years, there appears a wave of startups heralding some exciting new trend that poses a threat to the old guard, and each time, the frontrunners find themselves acquired by the incumbent vendors they were planning to disrupt. The cycle has preserved the industry’s balance of power for decades, but as the pace of change accelerates, that seems to be changing.
For the first time in a long time, the market is seeing the emergence of not one but two paradigm-shifting technologies in the same period: flash memory and hybrid cloud storage. The usual culprits have already made a number of highly publicised purchases to get in on the action, but many of the new vendors driving the transition are still clinging onto their independence, at least for the time being. Falling into that camp is Nasuni Inc., an up-and-coming provider of cloud-enabled arrays that raised $10 million in funding this week to take on the big leagues.