Our company

OpenIO was founded in 2015 by a group of engineers, passionate about technology. They had the foresight to develop ConsciousGrid™, an innovative technology that enables OpenIO to scale instantly. And while most object stores fall short when it comes to performance, OpenIO Object Storage was designed from the beginning to provide high performance throughput, making it an ideal choice for Big Data, AI and HPC workloads.

About OpenIO

OpenIO was founded by Laurent Denel (CEO), Jean-François Smigielski (CTO) and four other co-founders, to offer an innovative software-defined object store that builds hyper-scalable, on-premises infrastructures. We envision a data-centric world where OpenIO is recognized as the universal storage solution for unstructured data.

Object storage has always been very focused on low $/GB and high scalability, but some of its characteristics can make it less flexible and performant. From the very beginning, the OpenIO team wanted to change this paradigm, and aimed to create a solution that blends efficiency, flexibility and hyper-scalability with consistent high performance. Our mission today is to deliver an open source, high performance object storage solution that meets the demanding needs of customers working on Big Data, AI and HPC.

OpenIO Object Storage is based on a unique grid of nodes design and ConsciousGrid™ technology that:

has dynamic behaviors
is hardware-agnostic and supports heterogenous hardware within the same cluster
enables instant and unlimited scaling without mandatory data rebalancing;
has consistent high performance even during scaling operations
has been optimized for Big Data, HPC and AI

We aim to uphold all the promises of object storage, while including the additional benefits that can be found on other platforms.

Proud member of

Leadership

Laurent Denel CEO
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Jean-François Smigielski CTO
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Guillaume Delaporte VP Sales
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Stacie Desplanques Chief Marketing Officer
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Philippe Vandermolen Financial Director
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Julien Kasarherou Head of Grid for Apps
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Romain Acciari Head of Industrialization
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Milestones

Timeline:

2006
2007
2009
2012
2014
2015
2017
2018
2019

Previous year Next year

2006 Idea & initial concept
In the data center of the company we were working for, data needs were growing exponentially. Our traditional NAS/SAN storage solution was overwhelming the team charged with running these platforms. Simply adding more of the same was not an option. Since most of the data we were dealing with was made up of immutable objects, it was possible to switch to a web-like GET/PUT/DELETE paradigm instead of a POSIX filesystem API. This approach would also make it possible to eliminate the complex hardware required to run these filesystems in a fully distributed manner. This led to the idea of an object storage solution.
2007 Design & development
We designed a custom solution with a massively distributed directory, which enabled a true scale-out design. Each node would contain a part of the directory, so that the I/O intensive metadata load would be distributed across the cluster. Each new node would be immediately used, so there was no need to re-dispatch existing data to benefit from new hardware. Data storage would be decoupled from metadata storage, providing true scalability and unmatched performance.
2009 First massive production
In February 2009, we launched a new platform for a massive production of a large-scale email system. We realized that moving data to process it outside the storage platform was non-optimal. The platform had an excess of CPU and RAM, and we decided to run data processing on the object storage platform itself.
2012 Open sourced
We made the solution an open source project. Originally designed as a general-purpose object storage solution, it has since been used across multiple applications: consumer class email and cloud storage, archiving of radar speed control camera recordings, healthcare data, and much more.
2014 10+ PB managed
The object storage solution was used to store more than 10 Petabytes of email for two major French Telco/ISPs. These clusters stored 10 Billion objects, with 20Gbps of bandwidth capacity at peak hours. We provided 24/7 support for these critical systems.
2015 OpenIO is launched
We started OpenIO as a company, to offer the solution as a fully supported product.
2017 OpenIO Raises $5 million
We raised $5 million from Elaia and Partech.
2018 25 customers, 30 PB in production
After the first year of general availability, we have 25 customers using OpenIO to store more than 30 PB of primary data in production.
2019 OpenIO exceeds 1Tbps write speed
We confirmed our position as the best object store for Big Data, AI and HPC when we set a world record of 1.372 Tbps, in a production environment on a Criteo platform.

Investors

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Contacts

Headquarter

Lille
2 Bis Avenue Antoine Pinay
59510 Hem, France
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Japan

Tokyo
WeWork
Ark Hills South Tower 16F
1-4-5 Roppongi, Minato-ku
Tokyo 106-0032
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In the spotlight

Blog post Liberate your data and switch to object storage
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IDC Tech Spotlight Consider Object Storage for High-Performance Use Cases
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Blog post Can Instant Scaling Remove the Need to Rebalance Data?
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DATA SHEET OpenIO Object Storage for Big Data
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