February 2015

 

Pre-IPO Storage Companies Getting Additional Funding – Pivot3 and Exablox

27 Feb 2015, Posted by Jeska Rayboy in Blog

VC money keeps flowing into high growth storage start-ups that have a compelling value proposition. Below are some details on what Pivot3 and Exablox  have to offer that is exciting enough in such a competitive market to receive additional support and funding in 2015. vc funding

 

Pivot3 receives $45 million

Pivot3, Inc., in hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions, announced a $45 million equity and bank financing closing.

Argonaut Private Equity, a new investor in the company, joins S3 Ventures, InterWest Partners, Mesirow Financial Private Equity, and the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati investment fund in providing additional equity in this closing.

As a part of this round, Steve Mitchell, MD of Argonaut Private Equity, will join the board of directors.

“We invest in premier companies that can transform large and important industries,” said Steve Mitchell, MD, Argonaut Private Equity. “Pivot3 is on the leading edge of a once-in-several-decades transformation of the underlying technology that operates IT data centers globally.”

Industry analysts predict dramatic market growth in hyper-converged systems. According to the Technology Business Research quarterly webinar series in October 2014, “Converged systems are the go-to alternative to complicated piece-part infrastructure, sparking a $17.8 billion global market opportunity.”

“The pervasive need to address unmanageable IT complexity while providing lower cost and improved service on a global scale has created an environment for explosive growth in the HCI market,” said Ron Nash, chairman and CEO, Pivot3. “Pivot3 now has the opportunity to go from being an original innovator of hyper-converged infrastructure to becoming a global leader in providing transformative IT infrastructure technology to our customers, who are leaders in IT and security organizations.”   Click here for more. 

Exablox receives $16 Million

Exablox Corp. has received a $16 million Series-C funding round.

Dell Ventures is now a strategic investor, joining existing investors DCM Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners.

This investment validates Exablox’s vision for delivering scale-out object storage to every organization.

The company has now received $38.5 million in total funding.

The recent IDC Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2014-2018 Forecast Report projects that the file-and-object-based storage market will be $43.4 billion in 2018. IDC also states that by 2018 scale-out solutions will account for approximately 80% of the FOBS market.

With traditional models storage often has been purchased on a three- to four-year refresh cycle, forcing IT organizations to overprovision storage in anticipation of future business needs, which often results in forklift upgrades as business requirements change. This antiquated approach does not fit in an era of overwhelming growth in unstructured data, big data and the Internet of Things. Exablox’s OneBlox scale-out architecture provides a scalable solution that eliminates forklift upgrades and enables IT organizations to nearly instantaneously scale storage capacity, performance and/or availability to exactly meet their current business needs. Click here for more.

 

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What Is New With Oracle’s Storage Business?

05 Feb 2015, Posted by Jeska Rayboy in Blog

 

Oracle’s new generation of Exadata will be able to compete on price and still have the same high-end quality that their customers are used to. They have decided to take EMC/Cisco’s idea and emulate it with a competing product that Ellison believes will be superior to what is currently available in the market. oracle comic

Larry Ellison took the stage in the conference center of his company’s headquarters Jan. 21 to unveil Oracle’s X5 line of converged systems to staff, partners and customers.

Clearly comfortable in his new role as CTO, Ellison’s passion for engineering was evident as he talked about the technical capabilities of the Virtual Compute Appliance, Exadata Database Machine and other upcoming Oracle products.

While he may have been wearing his engineer cap, Ellison was still ever the salesman, ever the combatant. With typical bravado, Oracle’s founder threw down the gauntlet to Cisco and EMC, proclaiming he was ready to take them on in their own game of selling low-priced servers to power modern data centers.

Here’s Ellison in his own words.

Gen 5

We’re here to introduce the fifth generation of our engineered systems. Again, the idea is taking the hardware and software and during the engineering phase actually designing them to work together. We do the integration so you don’t have to. But more than that we locate functions at the right place in the stack. If it’s a storage function, we locate it closer to the storage. If it’s a compute function, it’s close to the compute service, and there’s security through all layers, through the storage, through the networking and through compute.

This is our fifth generation of engineered systems called X5.

Data Center Trends

The biggest data center trends are these two-socket Intel servers which have a very, very low purchase price. People are building the core of their data center around these two-socket Intel servers. And almost always running Linux.

So it’s a lot of two-socket servers, pretty much the cheapest servers you can buy, running an open-source operating system and people are building that as the core of their data center, and it’s very attractive because it has a low purchase price.

You can make the argument, we make the argument, that these do-it-yourself data centers are expensive. You do the integration rather than we do the integration.  Read Full Article.

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