MayaData

About MayaData

MayaData operates as a significant contributor in the cloud-native storage landscape, primarily known for developing and sponsoring OpenEBS, an open-source Container Attached Storage (CAS) solution. Founded in 2011 by Evan Powell and Uma Mukkara as CloudByte, the company was rebranded as MayaData in 2017 when Evan Powell, a serial entrepreneur with founding roles at Nexenta and StackStorm, took over as CEO to pivot the company towards an open-source-centric model. Kiran Mova, another co-founder and the company's Chief Architect, has been a principal maintainer and a driving force behind the OpenEBS project.

The company's core focus is addressing the complex challenge of persistent storage for stateful applications running on Kubernetes. Traditional storage systems are often ill-suited for the dynamic and portable nature of containerized environments. MayaData's business revolves around OpenEBS, which it donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it has become a prominent project. This open-source strategy fostered a large user community, providing valuable feedback and driving adoption. MayaData's business model involved offering enterprise-grade support, services, and commercial software that extended the capabilities of the open-source base, helping clients like Bloomberg, Comcast, and Flipkart manage stateful workloads at scale. The product suite included tools like MayaOnline for visibility and management, and Litmus for chaos engineering to ensure the resilience of stateful applications.

OpenEBS functions by transforming Kubernetes into a data layer, using containerized microservices to provision and manage storage volumes. This CAS approach allows storage to be managed with the same Kubernetes-native tools used for applications, providing granular, per-workload control and avoiding vendor lock-in. The platform supports various storage engines, enabling high availability through data replication across nodes and seamless portability across different cloud and on-premise environments. In February 2020, MayaData secured a significant $26 million funding round involving AME Cloud Ventures, Insight Partners, and DataCore Software, which also included a technology partnership to integrate DataCore's intellectual property. This collaboration culminated in November 2021, when DataCore Software officially acquired MayaData, integrating its team and technology to bolster DataCore's position in the container-native storage market.