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SwiftStack, a San Francisco-based data storage software company, announced today that it had attracted $6.1 million in Series A funding, bringing its total haul to date to $7.6 million. Mayfield Fund led the round with backing from Storm Ventures and UMC Capital.
The startup specializes in software defined storage for object storage, the method of choice for cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Similar to other storage virtualization schemes, the company’s platform enables organizations to layer sophisticated, enterprise-grade data storage management capabilities onto run of the mill IT hardware.
The hope is that for data center operators, both cloud and on-premise storage can be provisioned, managed and consumed seamlessly and cost efficiently with a little help from OpenStack, the popular open source cloud computing platform. “The company is uniquely positioned to be a frontrunner in the emerging software-defined storage market,” said Mayfield Fund managing director Navin Chaddha in a statement.
“With SwiftStack, application developers and operations teams can leverage the power of the public cloud storage inside their own datacenter, kind of like Amazon S3-in-a-box,” added Chaddha.
So far, the SwiftStack’s software has also proven its worth for some organizations, revealed Ryan Floyd, founder and general partner of Storm Ventures.
“SwiftStack has been tested with impressive results in large-scale deployments with early customers. For these customers, the SwiftStack solution has transformed how storage is provisioned, managed and accessed on industry-standard hardware,” stated Floyd in press remarks.
UMC Capital vice president Frank Lee feels that, as in the server market before it, the winds of change are blowing over the enterprise data storage scene.
“Hardware is rapidly accelerating to become commoditized, and SwiftStack uncovers the potential of this raw capacity through its innovative storage system. The company is poised to leverage the changing landscape, where customers are looking to make use of standards-based hardware for their storage needs,” stated Lee.
Judging by the recent burst in deal making surrounding software defined storage, other VCs feel the same.
ScaleIO raised $12 million in December to boost its sales and marketing efforts. The firm’s ScaleIO ECS (Elastic Converged Storage) pools server storage and makes it available to applications as a virtual SAN.
Last month, software defined storage firm Nexenta took in $24 million. Jeda Networks recently emerged from stealth to debut its software defined storage networking technology.
For Sunnyvale, Calif.-based virtual storage specialist Virsto, the days of investment rounds are over. Server virtualization pioneer VMware snapped up the software defined storage startup for an undisclosed amount a month ago.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Internet News, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
