Amplidata

Amplidata was founded in 2008 by Wim De Wispelaere (CEO) and Wouter Van Eetvelde (COO). De Spiegeleer founded Racktivity, Datacenter Technologies, Hostbasket and Dedigate and has been quoted as a proponent for European adoption of cloud computing. De Spiegeleer is also the CEO of Incubaid, which focuses on developing technology ventures via cloud computing and green data centers. Active member companies of Incubaid include: Amplidata, Ractivity, A-Server, Dacentec. Incubaid owns the automation framework used as the foundation for all the technologies that member companies create. Amplidata employs about 50 data storage experts. Some employees of Amplidata were employed by DataCenter Technologies, which was acquired by Symantec in 2005 and Q-layer, which became part of Sun Microsystems in 2009. In May 2010, Amplidata finalized the first round of venture capital funding worth 2.5 million euros, secured by Big Bang Ventures. Big Bang Ventures is known for specializing in funding for start-ups and strives to provide expertise and connections to entrepreneurs in the technology sector. According to CEO and Founder De Wispelaere, Amplidata needed the funding to boost sales and marketing activities in Europe. In September 2010, Amplidata closed a US$6 million funding round with investors Big Bang Ventures, Endeavour Vision and Swisscom Ventures. Following the funding, Amplidata announced the opening of a U.S. headquarters in Redwood City. However, the company does not plan to relocate its R&D departments, which are located in Belgium and Egypt. On March 3, 2015, it was announced that Amplidata was to be acquired by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. ==Technology==

The company has become known for developing unbreakable storage systems. Amplidata was designed to change the way data is stored. The company's patent-pending BitSpread encoding technology was created to offer the scalability and ease of use of a next-generation RAIN grid, while striving to create a 10,000 times more reliable alternative to RAID. Through more efficient usage of power and raw storage capacity, Amplidata works to drastically decrease the storage cost. Amplidata is known for easily scaling up to tens of Petabytes. Amplidata technology aims to overcome the limitations of RAID by the increasing length of time required to rebuild larger capacity drives. Rebuild times for 2TB drives are already known to take four hours or longer to complete, and in some cases—depending on how busy the storage system is—it can take days for a rebuild. There is also the need to keep all disks in a RAID group spinning so no power savings can be realized. Spin down is likely to become more important in the years to come as more data is archived to disk, with it likely becoming a function of the storage array to intelligently manage and place the archived data on these drives—as opposed to the software—to facilitate the spin-down of drives. Amplidata works to reduce the risk for data loss from one event in years—as measured on current storage systems—to one in thousands of years. Its DSS architecture was developed to ensure that a failure of a component such as a disk, storage node or even a full rack has no impact on data availability and a minimal impact on data redundancy. The technology enables data availability and reliability through an ability to reconstruct data from a subset of the originally stored disks. The entire system is permanently monitored and data integrity is constantly checked. As a result, bit errors on disks are proactively healed before they become an issue to the user. ==Products and Technologies==

Amplidata technologies that target cloud providers include BitSpread, BitDynamics and BitLog. ==References==