Diligent Technologies has netted $10.5 million in fourth-round funding, raising the data protection and de-duplicationspecialist’s total haul to date to $46.5 million.
Eastward Capital joined current investors Matrix, Accel and Gemini in the new round, which will be used for R&D and sales, support and engineering efforts.
Diligent CEO Doron Kempel said the company is “experiencing a significant and rapid increase in demand for our ProtecTIER enterprise data deduplication platform. In order to meet this demand, we raised funds that will allow us to increase our coverage in the field, enhance and accelerate our R&D plans,” and meet the demands of new distribution partners.
The company claims more than 100 customers, all of which are Fortune 1000 data center environments, since its product became generally available in January 2006. Diligent says its customer list includes three top telecommunications companies, a global auto manufacturer, a global financial company and health care and media and entertainment interests.
The company says it is “growing faster than two-fold per year,” and has about 20 openings in engineering alone, based in Israel.
Diligent says its disk-based VTL lets customers increase the capacity of disk systems by 25 times or more, with 1 PB of physical disk and 400 MB/s of throughput per system.
Data de-duplication has been one of the hottest storage technologies in the last year, offering enterprises a way to vastly reduce the amount of data they back up, and some vendors like NetApp are also looking at using the technology for primary storage.