The latest startup to have taken up the mission of bringing on-premise enterprise infrastructure up to par with the operational efficiency of the world’s largest clouds is InterModal Data Inc., which is launching a new kind of storage platform this morning that promises to greatly improve resource utilization. It’s inspired by the disaggregated rack architecture that Facebook Inc. is working to implement in its facilitates to make more out of the vast amounts of capacity needed to support the growing demands of its billion and a half monthly users.

The approach involves splitting up the operational functions of a traditional network-attached storage (NAS) enclosure across separate nodes that are each specially optimized for a different role. One system might be equipped solely with cheap disk drives to store low-priority data that doesn’t require particularly fast access speeds, while another can be set up to provide high-grade flash for an important transactional database. And a third node could be fitted with RAM to support in-memory workloads such as Apache Spark or SAP SE’s newly-updated HANA store.

Separating the different functions avoids the trade-offs that have to be made when everything is squeezed into a single space and thereby allows the disaggregated storage to operate between four and ten times more economically than traditional architectures, according to InterModal Data. Its platform connects the individual nodes with an Ethernet fiber that makes it possible for customers to have information automatically  shuffled around to optimize costs as operational requirements change.

An administrator could, for instance, set InterModal Data’s software to move records from a HANA node to a low-cost disk system as soon as they’ve been processed to reduce retention costs and free up RAM for other tasks. The fact that the process is handled programmatically enables organizations to use cheap commodity hardware without any built-in intelligence in the nodes and scale each independently to further cut infrastructure expenses. That value proposition has already earned the startup $4 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Azure Capital Partners and Allegis Capital, three of the main investors in Coraid Inc., the previous storage company of chief executive Dave Kresse.  

Image via Geralt