Incipient, InfiniCon Nab Funding

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Venture capitalists continue to be drawn to the storage space, with Incipient and InfiniCon the latest recipients of their largesse.

Incipient added another $10 million to complete a $25 million second round. The start-up, which came out of stealth mode earlier this year, has raised $35 million so far for its
intelligent storage software, which is expected to begin shipping later this year.

With a “good company and significant OEM relationships,” Data Mobility Group founder and senior analyst John Webster says Incipient is “positioned to take advantage of the storage fabric-based intelligence opportunity.”

New investor HLM Venture Partners joins Essex Investments and all of the company’s previous venture investors, including Greylock, Sigma, and Globespan Capital Partners (formerly JAFCO), in the new funding round. Incipient will use the money to expand its sales, marketing, and product development efforts.

Al Wiegman, general partner at HLM, says the VC firm is “impressed that the company is led by industry veterans from EMC, VERITAS, Hewlett-Packard, and
Compaq, who previously have been involved in the creation of mission-critical enterprise software.”

Founder and CEO Ric Calvillo, for example, previously founded Conley Corp., which was acquired by EMC and became the company’s Cambridge Software Center.

Incipient says its technology is built to take advantage of advanced intelligent storage networks by enabling enterprise users to manage, move, and protect data seamlessly, regardless of where and on what platform it is stored. The start-up has already signed on one high-powered partner in Brocade .

“This new model transforms the fabric from a passive component in the storage network to an active component that simplifies data management and provides enhanced storage services,” the company says.

InfiniCon Snags Funding, Fujitsu Deal

InfiniBand may not have realized all the promise its supporters had hoped for early on, but InfiniCon Systems appears to be making a strong go of it with the technology.

The InfiniBand start-up announced that it has received an additional $15 million in Series C funding. The company’s third round of funding was led by Bay Partners, and included ARCH Venture Partners, W Capital Partners, and A.G. Edwards Capital from prior rounds, as well as new investor Chevron Technology
Ventures. Three-year-old InfiniCon has received $48 million to date.

“This financing is a statement as to the traction that InfiniBand as a technology has seen in the market recently, as well as InfiniCon’s market vision and execution in delivering the distinct advantages that only InfiniBand brings to enterprise data center networking,” states InfiniCon CEO Charles Foley.

InfiniCon also announced that it has been selected by Fujitsu to provide an InfiniBand-based clustering fabric for the world’s fastest Linux-based supercomputer.

The Fujitsu cluster will be deployed by Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research to accelerate biotechnology research. It will feature Fujitsu’s newly developed Linux-based PRIMERGY servers, will contain 2,048 Intel Xeon processors, and will deliver a peak performance of 12.4 trillion FLOPs (floating point operations per second), vaulting it into the third position in the Top 500 rankings of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

“The power of InfiniBand has always been apparent in its design, but the issue has been when companies such as InfiniCon would bring this technology to the maturity level required for large-scale deployment,” says Vernon Turner, IDC’s group vice president of Global Enterprise Server Solutions. “This implementation by a tier-one server vendor, with strong HPC expertise, clearly signals the readiness of these solutions.”

InfiniCon’s InfinIO 3000 Switch Series will be used to interconnect the Fujitsu computing cluster, providing a non-blocking, 10Gbps full bisectional bandwidth fabric that will support 512 multi-processor nodes, the largest of any InfiniBand cluster to date.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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