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StorONE Real-Time Tiering Drives Record Q1, Surpassing Full-Year 2025 Sales

33 d ago

The 68th IT Press Tour took place in Boston, MA, last week, convening media and enterprises for deep discussions on IT infrastructure, cloud, networking, cybersecurity, data management, and AI. Six companies participated: ExaGrid, IO River, Juicedata, Paradigm4, Vinchin, and Wave Domain. ExaGrid, led by CEO Bill Andrews, is the largest independent vendor focused solely on backup storage, shipping for 18+ years to 5,200+ organizations across 108 countries. It is cash-positive, debt-free, with NPS +81 and 95.6% retention. Its Tiered Backup Storage architecture combines a disk-cache Landing Zone with a non-network-facing Repository Tier for deduplicated long-term data. New all-SSD models scale to 17.3PB at 115.2TB/hr ingest. ExaGrid integrates with 25+ backup apps including Veeam, Commvault, and Rubrik, and offers security features such as tiered air gap, AI-Powered Retention Time-Lock, and immutable objects. DR includes cross-site replication with 50:1 WAN efficiency. Support offers assigned L2 engineers and 7-year HDD guarantees. IO River, founded in 2022 by CEO Edward Tsinovoi and CTO Michael Hakimi, closed a $20M round in early 2026. Its "Virtual Edge" platform decouples edge infrastructure from app services across three layers, using AI-driven traffic steering over 15+ CDN providers (Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, etc.) via DNS/CNAME. It unifies configuration and management, virtualizes WAF and bot security with partners. IO River detects and reroutes around outages before providers do, preserving discounts. After one year of sales, it has about 50 customers across OTT/media, gaming, e-commerce, and hospitality, with zero attrition. Juicedata, represented by DevRel Joe Zhou, positions object storage as the backend for modern data infrastructure. Its JuiceFS separates data and metadata, chunking files into immutable 4MB blocks. The Community Edition (Apache 2.0) works with any metadata engine and object store. The Enterprise Edition adds a Raft-based scalable metadata engine, distributed data cache, and multi-cloud mirroring. One deployment handles 1.47PiB and 404B inodes. MiniMax uses JuiceFS in hybrid-cloud mode with GPU-based compute.