Yottabyte launches its ambitious OS to ‘deliver on the intent of the cloud’

Michigan-based Yottabyte claims to have a cloud-based operating system to control and manage virtually anything.

The startup is coming out of stealth mode today with a plan to build private, public, and hybrid enterprise cloud storage, creating Google- and Amazon-like clouds that runs on an existing storage area network (SAN). Its OS has been in beta for months.

Yottabyte was founded in 2010. It has raised just under $10 million in private investment and competes with Mountain View, Calif.-based Nimbula.

The product’s concept originated when the founders, Gregory M. Campbell and Paul Hodges, were sitting in a conference room tossing around ideas. “If we could put these together in a suite or a single system, we could actually deliver on the original intent of the cloud,” Campbell, the company’s CTO, explained. “The big, scaled out, successful public cloud companies like Google and Amazon built their infrastructures with inexpensive, no-name equipment and custom software built by gifted teams of Ph.D-level engineers employed to build these complicated, scalable systems.”

Most business can’t afford to employ these full research teams. Yottabyte aims to be a lower-cost software alternative that still runs on commodity hardware. It’s a nice idea, but analysts fear that it may be “overly ambitious.”

Yottabyte does not currently support public clouds such as Google Cloud Storage and Microsoft Windows Azure. It has its own data centers on each coast and a third in Bloomfield, Mich., where the company is based.

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