Amplidata is a privately-held cloud storage technology providerLinkedIn profile
" Retrieved March 7, 2011.BusinessWeek company profile
" Retrieved March 7, 2011. based in

Lochristi Lochristi () is a municipality located in the Belgian province of East Flanders. The municipality is composed of the towns of , Lochristi proper, , and Wachtebeke Wachtebeke () is a village in the Municipalities of Belgium, municipality of Loc ...

, Belgium. In November 2010, Amplidata opened its U.S. headquarters in

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in the Bay Area of Northern California, approximately south of San Francisco and northwest of San Jose. The city's population was 84,292 according to the 2020 census. The Port of Redwo ...

, California. The research and development department has locations in Belgium and Egypt, while the sales and support departments are represented in a number of countries in Europe and North America.Company Website.
Partners
." Retrieved March 8, 2011. Amplidata has developed a Distributed Storage System (DSS) technology designed to solve the scalability and reliability problems traditional storage systems face, by taking advantage of the introduction of large capacity SATA drives and

solid state disk A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, or solid-state disk. SSDs rely on non-vo ...

.David Hamilton, Web Host Industry Review.
Cloud 2.0: a Vision on the Next Generation of Cloud Products
." March 18, 2010. Retrieved March 8, 2011. By storing data across a selection of disks that are widely distributed across storage nodes, racks and sites, the DSS architecture spreads the risk of hardware failure to ensure that a failure of a component such as a disk, storage node or even a full rack has no impact on data availability and a minimal impact on data redundancy. The entire system is permanently monitored and data integrity is constantly checked. As a result, bit errors on disks are proactively healed before they become an issue to the user. Amplidata's AmpliStor distributes and stores data redundantly across a large number of disks.George Crump, Storage Switzerland.

?" October 12, 2010. Retrieved March 7, 2011.Dave Simpson, InfoStor.

" November 1, 2010. Retrieved March 7, 2011. The algorithm that AmpliStor uses first puts the data into an object and then stores the data across multiple disks in the AmpliStor system. By storing the data as an object, Amplidata can reconstruct the original data from any of the disks on which the data within the object resides.Pat Romanski, Cloud Computing Journal.
Cloud Storage Pioneer Amplidata Closes 2.5 Million Euro Series A Funding
" May 27, 2010. Retrieved March 8, 2011. Amplidata was acquired in March 2015 by

HGST HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk driv ...

, a

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. Established in 1970, the company is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDDs). History 1970s Western Digital ...

subsidiary.

History

Amplidata was founded in 2008 by Wim De Wispelaere (CEO) and Wouter Van Eetvelde (COO). The company was initially funded by Kristof De Spiegeleer. The two founders started the company to address some of the inherent weaknesses of high capacity disk systems, such as performance, bit error rates, mean time between failures and RAID rebuild times which have not improved sufficiently to keep up with the explosion of digital storage needs. The company’s headquarters are in Lochristi, near Gent in Belgium.Kiril Kirilov, CloudTweaks.
Amplidata Attacks U.S. and World Cloud Market with AmpliStor
" January 13, 2011. Retrieved March 7, 2011. De Spiegeleer founded Racktivity, Datacenter Technologies

an

Michael Kanellos, Greentech Media.
Startups: Ractivity Racks Up $8 Million
" November 30, 2010. Retrieved March 10, 2011. and has been quoted as a proponent for European adoption of

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

.Incubaid Green Unbreakable Cloud Initiative pdf
." Retrieved March 10, 2011. De Spiegeleer is also the CEO of Incubaid, which focuses on developing technology ventures via cloud computing and green data centers.Incubaid Website.
Introduction
" and
Company
." Retrieved March 10, 2011. Active member companies of Incubaid include: Amplidata, Ractivity, A-Server
Dacentec
Incubaid owns the automation framework used as the foundation for all the technologies that member companies create. Amplidata employs about 50 data storage experts. Some employees of Amplidata were employed by DataCenter Technologies, which was acquired by

Symantec Symantec may refer to: * Gen Digital, an American consumer software company formerly known as Symantec * Symantec Security, a brand of enterprise security software purchased by Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American multinational corporation, ...

in 2005 and Q-layer, which became part of

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

in 2009. In May 2010, Amplidata finalized the first round of venture capital funding worth 2.5 million euros, secured b
Big Bang Ventures
Big Bang Ventures is known for specializing in funding for start-ups and strives to provide expertise and connections to entrepreneurs in the technology sector. According to CEO and Founder De Wispelaere, Amplidata needed the funding to boost sales and marketing activities in Europe. In September 2010, Amplidata closed a USD 6 million funding round with investors Big Bang Ventures, Endeavour Vision and Swisscom Ventures. Following the funding, Amplidata announced the opening of a U.S. headquarters in Redwood City. However, the company does not plan to relocate its R&D departments, which are located in Belgium and Egypt. On March 3, 2015, it was announced that Amplidata was to be acquired by

, a

subsidiary. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Technology

The company has become known for developing unbreakable storage systems. Amplidata’s Optimized Object Storage system enables customers to build large-scale online storage systems that aim to meet the highest reliability and availability requirements at the lowest cost.Cloud Computing Expo 2011 Website:
2011 East Sponsors and Exhibitors
" Retrieved March 8, 2011. Amplidata was designed to change the way data is stored. The company’s patent-pending BitSpread encoding technology was created to offer the scalability and ease of use of a next-generation RAIN grid, while striving to create a 10,000 times more reliable alternative to RAID. Through more efficient usage of power and raw storage capacity, Amplidata works to drastically decrease the storage cost. Amplidata is known for easily scaling up to tens of

Petabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

. Amplidata technology aims to overcome the limitations of RAID by the increasing length of time required to rebuild larger capacity drives. Rebuild times for 2TB drives are already known to take four hours or longer to complete, and in some cases—depending on how busy the storage system is—it can take days for a rebuild. There is also the need to keep all disks in a RAID group spinning so no power savings can be realized. Spin down is likely to become more important in the years to come as more data is archived to disk, with it likely becoming a function of the storage array to intelligently manage and place the archived data on these drives—as opposed to the software—to facilitate the spin-down of drives. Amplidata works to reduce the risk for data loss from one event in years—as measured on current storage systems—to one in thousands of years. Its DSS architecture was developed to ensure that a failure of a component such as a disk, storage node or even a full rack has no impact on data availability and a minimal impact on data redundancy. The technology enables data availability and reliability through an ability to reconstruct data from a subset of the originally stored disks. The entire system is permanently monitored and data integrity is constantly checked. As a result, bit errors on disks are proactively healed before they become an issue to the user.

Products and Technologies

Amplidata technologies that target cloud providers include BitSpread, BitDynamics and BitLog. Amplidata’s technology addressing the end of RAID is BitSpread. It is a RAID replacement technology based on erasure coding that spreads data and parity out across multiple nodes in the storage grid. It aims to greatly minimize the impact of a

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

or disk failure. Customers can configure availability based on their needs and can have multiple availability policies within a single storage system. Recovery of a drive or node is comparatively very fast, unlike RAID. BitDynamics provides the storage cluster with scalability and self-healing. It performs proactive self-verification of disk bit errors and then automatically heals that disk block or entire disk as needed. This aims to reduce the amount of work that BitSpread needs to do on a component failure and is expected to improve overall system reliability. BitLog leverages idle power on the connecting host by using local SSD and HDD cache to provide continuous logged sequential writes from the host to the storage. Then, in turn, it will give high random read performance with the SSD cache, local in the application server for the most frequently accessed data. Meaning that a hot file does not even need to go across the storage network, it can be delivered directly from the application server. In addition, BitLog includes thin provisioning, unlimited snapshots, writeable clones and out-of-band optimization. AmpliStor product provides object storage for petabyte-scale, unstructured data applications.Constantin Gonzalez, Constant Thinking.
Checking Out the Amplidata Storage Cloud
" March 28, 2011. Retrieved March 31, 2011.

References

{{Western Digital Western Digital Software companies of Belgium Companies based in Ghent