Start-ups to Watch 2018

In alphabetical order:

Coolan

Using machine learning techniques, the company’s platform analyzes operational data from a customer’s data center fleet and makes suggestions for lowering cost and reducing the chance of downtime. It makes decisions based not only on data from a single customer’s data centers but from data collected from data centers of the entire community of its customers.

Device42

DCIM is notorious for the huge amounts of money companies have to spend on deploying the solutions and the lengthy deployment schedules. Device42’s focus on this problem has helped the relatively small company grow faster than many others in the space. Its functionality includes IT asset and IP address management, power monitoring, and software license management.

IIX

Also offering a simpler way to provision network links between your servers and servers of your cloud providers or partners in data centers around the world is Silicon Valley-based IIX. Its Software-as-a-Service platform called Console makes it easy to establish connections between any of the 150 data centers on its list. The platform automates Layer 2 and Layer 3 BGP configuration and auto-assigns Autonomous System Numbers. It can be used through a graphic interface or a RESTful API.

Megaport

Using software-defined networking technology, the company has made purchasing connectivity services as easy as purchasing cloud VMs from an Amazon Web Services or a Microsoft Azure. You can use a web interface, a mobile app, or Megaport’s open API to provision connectivity from any Megaport-enabled data center to any of the 250 or so service providers, clouds, or enterprises.

Romonet

Croydon, UK-based Romonet came out of stealth in 2010 with the first iteration of its data center management platform that uses predictive modeling to pinpoint what effect any particular decision about data center design or management will have on performance or the bottom line. Its key strength is analyzing information about a data center from the financial perspective.

TSO Logic

Vancouver-based TSO Logic fills the gap in data center efficiency analysis left by most DCIM software vendors – monitoring the way applications utilize IT gear. TSO can collect data from DCIM underneath, tap directly into CPU power, temperature, and utilization metrics through Intel’s Data Center Manager middleware, analyze data from the virtualization platform, and know who within the organization a VM or an application belongs to using data from ITSM software. The wider the variety of data the platform ingests, the more useful its output will be.

Vapor IO

Its alternative to the traditional rack, the Vapor Chamber, which consists of six wedge-shaped server racks arranged in a cylinder. Cold air comes into the servers from outside, and warm air gets exhausted into a “hot column” inside, which replaces the hot aisle. Exhaust air gets sucked out at the top of the chamber. Vapor IO claims its chamber saves space and offers a way to deploy a high-density data center anywhere with enough air conditioning and power.

Vapor IO has also developed a commercial server and rack management software product called Vapor Core and open sourced a portion of it as OpenDCRE, or Open Data Center Runtime Environment.

Sources:

DCK: Data Center Technology Startups to Watch in 2016