Tuxera, a file system leader from Europe

Tuxera, the data management storage company from Finland, founded in 2008, joined the recent IT Press Tour in Berlin. It was the perfect opportunity to get an update on the company and its product strategy.

The firm generates in 2022 approximately €25.1 million with €5.9 million of EBITDA for 130 employees. This revenue comes from APAC for 55%, North America for 26% and Europe for 19%. In terms of vertical industries, automotive is clearly #1 with 49% of the revenue followed by consumer and telco & network manufacturers. To support that growth, Tuxera also made 2 acquisitions, Datalight in 2019 and HCC Embedded in 2021, and they both immediately contribute significantly to the revenue trajectory.

On the business side, the team addresses 2 segments, the embedded and the enterprise market, with 2 distinct product lines.

The firm is well known for its embedded file system products largely adopted worldwide and distributed by key oem partners. This is today covered by the Tuxera Reliance product family. Tuxera also develops Disk Manager, a famous recognized tool to manage file system between MacOS and Windows with FAT, exFAT or NTFS but also APFS and HFS+, it is now promoted as part of the Gravity CS product line. And there are a few other products like networking or flash oriented ones. The team will add snapshot, deduplication or encryption and later a distributed file system should appear as well plus some additional security features. By embedded it means various use cases and customers like automotive for built-in DVR storage, energy with smart metering or video capture for the space industry.

The second group of solutions targeting enterprises is represented by Fusion and NTFS by Tuxera, Enterprise Edition. Fusion file share is a high performance SMB product already chosen by Croit, StorONE or WEKA to name a few. It is a real alternative to Samba on Linux and delivers high performance and security levels, up to 60x times faster than Samba, operating in active/passive or active/active mode with persistent handles, failover, in scale-out configurations. Of course, this product supports SMB over RDMA, multi-channel, compression, optimized for MacOS clients and Windows oriented features like Active Directory, quota, ACL plus encryption signing and authentication. This is why some file storage players have adopted it as Tuxera is synonymous of quality. Running on various Linux distributions, Fusion works with Windows 11 and below, Windows Server 2022, MacOS and supports CIFS, SMB 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 3.0.2 and 3.1.1. This solution is definitely a strong SMB solution for enterprises beyond classic Samba, Ryussi or Visuality.

With a close and pretty unique partnership with Microsoft since 2009, the company has developed a NTFS enterprise flavor for Linux that complements native Windows NTFS and MacOS capabilities. Finally Tuxera has made NTFS a universal file system “extracting” a proprietary approach to the masses. This is used for instance by Orca Security.

Speaking about file system expertise, clearly when a vendor or user is looking for cross platform, enterprise or embedded file storage solution, Tuxera should be considered, no doubt about this.