Izumobase

IzumoBASE Inc., a Tokyo-based venture spun out from the University of Tokyo, was established on April 27, 2012, by Jumpei Arakawa. The founder, who holds a Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology, dedicated over 15 years, including his time at the university, to researching storage virtualization, distributed storage, and security, which formed the company's technical foundation. The firm specializes in developing software-defined storage (SDS) technologies aimed at the big data and cloud computing sectors.

The company's core business involves the development and provision of storage software products, alongside research and consulting in storage technology. IzumoBASE targets clients such as large-scale telecommunication providers and educational institutions that require robust data management solutions. The business model centers on delivering its proprietary software to manage the explosive growth of unstructured data from sources like IoT, cloud services, and media content. A significant milestone was achieved in August 2018 when IzumoBASE was acquired by and became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sakura Internet Inc. Before the acquisition, the company had secured $1.4 million in a Series A funding round on November 28, 2014, with investors including Global Brain and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital.

IzumoBASE's flagship product is "IzumoFS," a file-system-based SDS that creates a scalable and secure distributed storage platform. A key feature of IzumoFS is its pure peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, which eliminates the need for specialized nodes like metadata servers, thereby preventing single points of failure and performance bottlenecks. The software is designed for simplicity, with a claimed installation time of about one minute. It uniquely offers a choice between replication for performance and a secret sharing scheme for enhanced security, a feature that allows data to be split and distributed, making it unrecoverable if only a piece is compromised. Other technical capabilities include inline data deduplication, which optimizes storage capacity in real-time, and the flexibility to run on commodity hardware, reducing overall costs. The company also developed "Mankai," a scalable block storage solution optimized for cloud environments. Keywords: software-defined storage, distributed storage, data management, cloud storage, big data infrastructure, storage virtualization, scale-out NAS, peer-to-peer storage, data security, unstructured data, IzumoFS, Jumpei Arakawa, Sakura Internet, data deduplication, secret sharing storage, enterprise storage, IT infrastructure, Tokyo startup, University of Tokyo spin-off, high-availability storage