New funds aimed to fuel growth by accelerating development, expanding sales and marketing, and growing international operations.
Hybrid-cloud storage software provider Cloudian has fortified itself for more sales warfare in the cutthroat flash storage appliance market.
The San Francisco-based company said Oct. 27 that it has completed a $41 million financing round. The round includes new investors Lenovo, City National Bank, Epsilon Venture Partners, and DVP Investment.
Also participating were all existing investors, including Intel Capital, INCJ, Eight Roads (the proprietary investment arm of FIL, Fidelity International Limited) and Goldman Sachs. The funding brings Cloudian’s total capital raised to date to $79 million.
The company said the new funds will fuel growth by accelerating development, expanding sales and marketing, and growing international operations to meet the rising demand for scale-out, hybrid cloud object storage solutions.
Designed for On-Premises Hybrid Clouds
Cloudian’s HyperStore appliances run on its own storage software. Both are designed to run on-premises-based hybrid cloud systems.
HyperStore software can be deployed on a user’s existing hardware or preinstalled on a HyperStore appliance. Features include hybrid cloud streaming, virtual nodes, configurable erasure coding, and data compression and encryption to go with standard system management control, monitoring capabilities and reporting.
Cloudian’s object-based storage aims to provide both on-premise and public cloud storage within a single distributed file system (similar to Cleversafe, Scality and EMC Atmos). Cloudian’s key value proposition is providing a single storage pool between on-prem and public cloud at an economical price point.
During the past year, Cloudian said it has accelerated customer acceptance with 300 percent increase in bookings, 100 percent growth in its customer base and 100 percent customer retention. Cloudian customers value the company’s modular, scale-out design that allows a single storage manager to effectively manage hundreds of petabytes of capacity, a level that would require a dozen or more storage managers with conventional systems.
Now Available on AWS
In August, Cloudian announced the availability of Cloudian HyperStore on AWS Marketplace. This enables customers to purchase their on-premises storage on a metered-by-use basis, manage it alongside Amazon S3 storage as a single pool, and then receive a single invoice for both.
Last June, Cloudian and Lenovo announced an OEM agreement that enables Lenovo’s worldwide salesforce to offer a Cloudian-based object storage appliance.
On Oct. 20, Google announced Google Cloud Storage Coldline, a long-term archival storage service. Cloudian is integrated with Coldline, allowing customers to create a hybrid storage environment for rapid data access and nearly instantaneous search.
Users store and retrieve data from the Cloudian system on-premises, while applying policies for automatic data migration to Coldline. When data is migrated, metadata is retained within the Cloudian system, allowing Coldline-stored data to be searched locally to accelerate data discovery. Administrators manage all their data, whether on-premises or in the cloud, as a single storage pool.
“Until recently the focus for most storage administrators was to store and manage large amounts of data. Businesses are now looking to analyze this goldmine of data to find patterns that could enhance products or services,” said Amita Potnis, an IDC research manager. “Cloudian has tackled both problems with a scale-out design and an integrated insight engine that lets users store and analyze data on the same system.”
Updated Software Earlier This Year
Earlier this year Cloudian announced HyperStore 6.0, a significant platform update that bolstered the product’s capabilities with proactive data repair, Amazon S3 cross-region replication for disaster recovery, and smart storage features to expand the product’s in-platform analytics capabilities.
Cloudian HyperStore provides enterprises and managed service provider with petabyte-scale storage, data protection, and smart analytics for use cases including backup/archive, media and entertainment, bioinformatics, IoT, and more.
HyperStore can scale from a mere three nodes to hundreds, allowing systems to be right-sized for any application or organizational need.
Cloudian solutions are available as an appliance or as stand-alone software for commodity hardware, and may be configured with a file connector that facilitates CIFS, NFS and FTP services.
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