Primary Data Emerges From Stealth

The team from flash storage provider Fusion-io are at it again, as Primary Data came out of stealth this week with a platform that virtualizes data across a single global dataspace. After leaving Fusion-io David Flynn and Rick White founded Primary Data and raised an initial $50 million financing round. Earlier this month they went back to the Fusion-io team, and named former COO Lance Smith as Primary Data CEO, and this week reunited with Apple co-founder and Silicon Valley icon Steve Wozniak as Chief Scientist for the new company.

At the DEMO Fall 2014 conference this week in San Jose Primary Data launched with Smith saying that the company is "a catalyst that makes the software-defined datacenter a reality". Smith went on to say that in "virtualizing data across a single global dataspace, enterprises can extract more performance from their infrastructure and easily scale with growth. Automated, policy-driven data placement enables IT to finally respond dynamically to business requirements in real time, delivering breakthrough agility that transforms today’s datacenters.”

Primary Data says its initial product offering is available as an integrated platform comprised of a data hypervisor, a data director acting as a central management system, a policy engine, and global dataspace. Remaining agnostic to both storage hardware and storage protocols, Primary Data explains that its policy engine provides on-demand data placement, giving access across file, block and object stores, and a full complement of data services.