YottaYotta

About YottaYotta

YottaYotta emerged in January 2000 as a privately held company specializing in intelligent, globally distributed storage solutions. With offices established in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and Alexandria, Virginia, the firm targeted its services towards governments and Fortune 500 companies. The core of YottaYotta's business was addressing the challenges of information sharing, high availability, and business continuity across large geographic areas.

The company's flagship product was the NetStorager® GSX 2400, a network-based RAID controller. This system's key intellectual property was its ability to use a network, such as InfiniBand or GigE, as its backplane, allowing the controller to be physically distributed across thousands of kilometers. This distributed caching technology was designed to create wide-area network (WAN)-based storage infrastructures that performed as if they were local, overcoming the significant network latency that would typically slow down response times. YottaYotta claimed its solution could provide a 40-fold performance increase compared to traditional data sharing models. The company's business model focused on consolidating data management for top-tier scientific, military, and enterprise clients.

Despite raising approximately $80 million in R&D funding, YottaYotta faced challenges. A pivotal moment in the company's trajectory occurred when it shifted its focus from the broader storage systems market to exclusively marketing its RAID controllers. In 2008, the company shut down its operations. Following the closure, EMC, which had previously invested in YottaYotta for its "Grid Storage" strategic direction, acquired the company's intellectual property and hired a significant portion of its engineering team, including an estimated 40 former employees. The acquisition was seen as a strategic move for EMC to bolster its capabilities in fast data replication and access across dispersed data centers.