DIY data storage platform Koor launches

Koor Technologies, a monitoring, management, and automation provider that makes it easy to operate large-scale data stores, officially launched as a company.

Its platform, Koor Data Control Center, now in beta, helps medium-size and large organizations that struggle with storing and managing data by themselves in a simple, cost-effective way. To lead the buildout of the platform, the company also announced the hiring of experienced software engineer and former Workday executive Dave Mount as CTO.

"You shouldn’t have to choose between public cloud lock-in and the complexity of on-premises, do-it-yourself solutions. And now you don’t have to," Mount said.

Koor Data Control Center’s features include:

Graphical user interface: configure, deploy, and operate open-source storage without using a command line. Understand the health of your system at a glance with the storage cluster radar, then look through a series of status dials and graphs of system activity.

Configuration Patterns: the industry’s only pre-built templates that allow organizations to automatically configure and deploy open-source storage to address specific use cases, such as S3 bucket operations, database support, research data access, logging, and backups. This significantly reduces the time and effort it takes to discover how to configure and deploy storage for a specific use case - and then to actually do it correctly.

Live Tips: controls that are instrumented with pop-up explanations about what configuration parameters are for and the expected effects of any adjustments. Learn what you need to in the context where you need it.

Introducing Koor, the DIY Data Storage Platform

For organizations seeking relief from the public cloud’s lock-in and hidden charges, the Ceph open-source software-defined storage platform offers unmatched benefits. It provides block, object, and file storage in a fully distributed, fault-tolerant, and highly available platform.

However because of Ceph’s complexity, many organizations either abandon their efforts early on or avoid adopting it altogether. And for those that do stick with it, the time spent getting things to work just right and troubleshooting issues can lead to a loss of productivity. The necessary engineering effort ends up costing about the same as if they’d outsourced their data storage to the cloud - eliminating one of the biggest benefits.

Koor contributes to and helps maintain the Rook open-source project, which automates traditional storage administrator tasks and orchestrates Ceph using Kubernetes. The in-depth, up-to-date expertise developed through that work is built into Koor Data Control Center through Configuration Patterns, Live Tips, and other features - and made available at a fraction of the cost of bringing that expertise in-house.

"What’s desperately needed in this market is full visibility into your systems - not just Ceph or Rook or Kubernetes, but a complete data control plane. Koor is filling a crucial gap that will finally make DIY storage simple and effective," said Bassam Tabbara, founder and CEO of Upbound and the creator of the Rook project.