ClearSky Data has come up with an interesting approach to solve the data storage cost and speed problem. Today it was rewarded with a $27 million Series B round to continue the mission.
The company came out of stealth in August with a plan to offer customers a multi-tier, fully managed, hybrid data-management solution. In practice this involves an appliance that’s installed in your data center (or in AWS or Azure) and houses the company’s most important hot data, a second level of storage stored at a co-location facility within 120 miles of a customer deals with somewhat important or warm data and finally Amazon S3 storage for stuff you don’t need all that often or cold data.
The idea is that you can reduce cost by distributing the data across these tiers, with the data you need the most stored closest to you for the least latency. The secret sauce is the software and algorithms that manage all of it and moves the data between the various tiers automatically based on usage patterns, policy and customer requirements.
