Datera
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software-defined storage |
| Founded | 2013 |
| Founder | Marc Fleischmann, Nicholas Bellinger, Claudio Fleiner |
| Defunct | April 2021 |
| Fate | Acquired by VMware |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Guy Churchward (CEO), Flavio Santoni (former Chief Revenue Officer), Narasimha Valiveti (former Chief Product Officer), Marc Fleischmann (co-founder, former President) |
| Products | Software-defined storage platform |
Datera was an international software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, focusing on an enterprise-grade software-defined storage solution. The company was acquired by VMware in April 2021. Datera catered to hyperscale storage infrastructures and cloud providers aiming for hybrid cloud systems that are autonomous and adaptable. Its platform operated on standard servers from manufacturers such as Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Lenovo, Supermicro, and QUANTA, facilitating management of block and object storage across data centers, private clouds, and hybrid cloud setups.
History
Established in 2013 by open-source storage pioneers Marc Fleischmann, Nicholas Bellinger, and Claudio Fleiner, Datera officially launched in 2016 after securing $40 million in investment from entities including Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Pradeep Sindhu.
In 2017, the company collaborated with a private cloud platform to provide scalable private cloud solutions tailored for various workloads. That same year, Flavio Santoni—previously EVP at LSI Corporation and CEO of Syncsort—was appointed Chief Revenue Officer. In 2018, Narasimha Valiveti, formerly VP of software engineering at Dell EMC, took on the role of Chief Product Officer. Guy Churchward, who had served as CEO at DataTorrent and Divisional President at Dell EMC, joined the board in 2018 and became CEO in December.
A significant development occurred in January 2019 when Datera entered a go-to-market alliance with Hewlett Packard Enterprise through the HPE Complete program, allowing customers to purchase integrated solutions with a single order from HPE. This partnership reportedly drove a 500% increase in business during the first half of 2019. By October 2019, Datera and HPE introduced the HPE Datera Cloud Kit—a bundled offering combining Datera software licenses with HPE networking equipment, servers, cabling, and support services designed for containerized and virtualized environments.
In 2019, CRN recognized Datera as an Emerging Storage Vendor. The following year, the company received “Veeam-Ready” certification for its repository capabilities. Additionally, its platform earned Red Hat OpenStack Certification for its Cinder driver compatibility across various OpenStack releases.
Datera further extended its market presence by partnering with Fujitsu to incorporate its Data Services Platform into Fujitsu’s worldwide product line.
In April 2020, co-founder and President Marc Fleischmann left the company to explore new ventures.
Technology
Datera’s flagship offering is a block-based, scale-out software-defined storage system designed for transaction-heavy workloads utilizing the iSCSI protocol. It provides flexible primary storage solutions suitable for on-premises data centers as well as private and hybrid cloud environments. Organizations can integrate hardware and media from multiple vendors to create distributed, scalable storage clusters that support workloads running on bare metal, virtual machines, or within containers.
The platform incorporates automation and data orchestration techniques to strategically position data based on geography, node attributes, and media type while continuously adjusting performance metrics per application—minimizing manual intervention. Employing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Datera analyzes storage environments to automatically optimize configurations according to predefined policies.
Native integrations include support for OpenStack, VMware vSphere, CloudStack, along with container orchestration tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos.