Actona’s Remote Storage Management Wows VCs

Actona Technologies, which offers wide area file services for centrally managing remote data, has nabbed $10 million in third-round funding.

The round brings the four-year-old start-up’s total funding to date to $23 million.

Actona says its storage centralization technology removes storage, management, and backup functions from remote offices and centralizes them in
the data center, improving data protection and reducing the cost and complexity of storage management. The technology lets enterprises consolidate storage and servers and centralize backup and disaster recovery processes, while giving remote users LAN-like access to data, according to the company.

Actona ActaStor

The Los Gatos, Calif.-based firm’s ActaStor technology uses an EdgeServer at branch and remote offices to protect data and deliver it to the data center through a CoreServer. The system supports CIFS and NFS protocols from end-to-end, is software-based, and uses commodity hardware.

With more than half of all data outside the data center and laws and regulations like HIPAA demanding it be protected, CEO Randy Ditzler sees an opportunity for Actona. Add to that the fact that IT departments must do more with less, and marketing VP John Henze thinks the company has a winner.

“The ROI is very, very compelling to users,” Henze told Enterprise Storage Forum.

The Taneja Group thinks the market for wide area file services will grow to $2 billion annually by 2005. “As this space heats up over the next 12 months, enterprises will rethink the way they manage, protect, and access their branch office data,” states Arun Taneja, founder and senior analyst of
the Taneja Group.

“Many of the headaches associated with provisioning, consolidating, protecting, and managing file data across multiple sites can now be handled in one fell swoop,” Taneja continues.

Actona’s EdgeServer can handle 1TB of data, and in the “more than a handful” of Fortune 100 companies currently using the product, none have had
to add storage, claims Ditzler.

Pricing for the EdgeServer is $10,000-$25,000, depending on the number of users, and the CoreServer runs $12,000-$30,000, depending on the number of offices.

The latest funding round was led by Mayfield and included participation from current investors Sequoia Capital, Evergreen Partners, and the Fantine Group. The funding will be used to expand sales, marketing, customer service, and business development efforts, according to the company.

Actona also announced that Peter Levine, managing director at Mayfield and a 12-year VERITAS Software veteran, has joined the company’s board of directors.

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