The prerequisite to tapping the vast amounts of data coming off the connected universe is an economic way to store that information while the analysis performed, which is what earned a startup called Scality Inc. $45 million in funding last week. The investment caps off two years of tremendous growth that saw sales of its storage platform more than quadruple.

The software decouples capacity and management operations from the underlying hardware, allowing organizations to use cheap off-the-shelf equipment for their environments to lower costs. Scality claims that this allows its platform to efficiently accommodate up to petabytes of data with the same reliability and security of traditional arrays.

The prospect of lowering operational overhead is always appealing in the data center, but not every organization needs the ability to store petabytes upon petabytes of information. In fact, the majority require much less and simultaneously have to maintain their existing hardware investments, which are typically the same kind of traditional arrays that Scality has set out to replace.

It’s those organizations that are the focus of ClearSky Data Inc., another storage startup that made headlines last week after exiting stealth with a service that makes it possible to extend on-premise equipment with capacity from the cloud. The most important information is kept on that in-house infrastructure, while less sensitive but frequently used records are relegated to a nearby co-location facility and the remainder is sent to a remote platform such as Amazon Web Services.

That takes care of storage, but there’s still the matter of extracting insights from the data, which LinkedIn Inc. hopes to simplify with its latest acquisition.  Fliptop Inc. has developed an analytics service for scoring the value of leads that will be integrated into the social networking giant’s organic sales offering over the coming months to help marketers target members more effectively.

Photo via Geralt