Intransa Rakes In $25 Million, Targets SMBs

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Intransa appears to be catching on in IP storage, at least enough to convince the company’s investors to shell out big bucks.

Intransa announced $25 million in fourth-round funding, bringing its total funding to $74 million. Intransa marketing vice president Ravi Pendekanti says it took less than two months to raise the money, and the funding round was oversubscribed.

Menlo Ventures led the round, which included participation from current investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, Sofinnova Ventures, U.S. Ventures, and investments from several strategic partners.

Pendekanti says Intransa is increasing revenues and product shipments at a 60% quarter-over-quarter growth rate, and boasts more than 125 product installations at an average of more than 4 TB each. Half of the customers are green field accounts, he says, and half are enterprise-class departmental users.

“It’s only a matter of time until we get into the data center,” Pendekanti boasts.

Intransa also unveiled the IP 3000 Storage System, a companion to its enterprise-class IP 5000 targeted at small and mid-size businesses (SMBs).

Starting at $32,000 for a 2TB system and $38,000 for a 4 TB system, Pendekanti says the IP 3000 is a complete solution that includes hardware, software and a year of support.

“We’re not going to give you this a la carte menu and run the price up,” he says.

The system includes an IBM controller (with “our magic sauce on it,” says Pendekanti), a disk enclosure, and software. It can scale to 16TB with no downtime, and can also be upgraded to an IP 5000.

It can be installed in less than hour, with “seamless integration into existing infrastructure,” he says.

The IP 3000 offers virtualization, mirroring, host access control, and online capacity expansion. It guarantees data availability and accessibility with multiple physical mirrors with flexible mirror management. Virtual point-in-time copies (snapshots) allow backups, data mining, or application testing to be completed without affecting access to critical data resources. Intransa reduced the cost and complexity of the IP 3000 by using iSCSI and a standard Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure, and incorporating commodity technologies such as Ethernet switches and Cat 5 cabling, which help simplify installation, management, and maintenance.

“The IP SAN movement is a classic disruptive technology,” states Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “This protocol for storage networks meets the needs of mid-tier to enterprise-class IT organizations looking for value and seamless integration with existing infrastructure and staff — especially those that have been over-served by traditional, difficult to manage, and very expensive network storage technology. IP SAN products, such as those being delivered by Intransa, will provide a great business opportunity to market participants and a severe threat to those suppliers that do not respond.”

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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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