ScaleIO, the leader in software-defined storage, today announced that it
has raised $12 million from Greylock IL Partners, Norwest Venture
Partners (NVP), and private investors. The company will use the funding
to expand its field operations in response to growing demand by
enterprises and service providers for the ScaleIO ECS software product.
ScaleIO ECS eliminates the dependence on complex, expensive external SAN
and fabric by presenting business application servers’ local disks as a
robust, high-performance, shared virtual SAN. ECS converges storage into
compute on application servers. Also, ECS is capable of scaling capacity
and performance linearly to thousands of servers, thus breaking the
traditional barrier of storage scalability.
ECS helps data center operators solve today’s main challenges:
scalability, capacity planning, infrastructure management, and power and
space availability. With its converged storage approach, ECS enables
data centers to cut storage costs by more than 80%, delivering a direct
savings of more than 28% on an organization’s total IT budget.
"ScaleIO ECS enables customers to break free of storage vendors’
hardware lock-in and in the process, unleashes new economies, features,
and innovations not seen before in enterprise storage,” said investor
Frank Slootman, CEO of ServiceNow and previously CEO of Data Domain. "It
is an idea whose time has come: storage defined by software, not
hardware; elastic capacity; commoditization of the underlying hardware;
and a simplified management paradigm. Early demand for ECS by enterprise
customers is indicative of the great promise of this new entry bursting
onto the enterprise storage scene.”
Jacob Klein, senior vice president at SAP, explained: “We are a ScaleIO
customer. ScaleIO ECS, in our experience, has had a dramatic effect on
the overall price-performance of HANA. ECS delivers the same quality of
service and performance as a traditional appliance-based SAN at a much
lower cost. ScaleIO ECS would be an excellent fit for any HANA customer.”
"The need to somehow deliver storage with scalability, flexibility,
convergence, manageability, and savings all together is a
conundrum faced by most IT users," said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst at
Enterprise Strategy Group. "Turning one 'thing' into many smaller
'things' has been the success of constructs such as server
virtualization; now we are looking to re-combine multiple existing
components into global pools while meeting all those needs. This is the
essence of ScaleIO's software-defined 'elastic converged storage,' which
aims to deliver big operational and financial value and—perhaps most
important—already has significant customers in production."
“ScaleIO’s product offering addresses a tremendous market opportunity
and solves a significant pain point for enterprises and service
providers,” said Yoram Snir, chair of the board of ScaleIO and a partner
at Greylock IL Partners. “ScaleIO ECS significantly lowers the total
cost of ownership for enterprise grade storage.”
Dror Nahumi, partner at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), added: "The
ScaleIO team has extensive experience in building advanced storage
software products and proven success in taking them to market.” See Mr.
Nahumi’s blog at http://nvp-blog.com/index.php/scaleio/.
The storage industry veterans at ScaleIO have worked together for almost
15 years, designing and developing storage software products at IBM,
Topio (acquired by NetApp), NetApp, LSI, XtremIO (acquired by EMC), and
other companies. ScaleIO’s team members have received nearly 20 data
storage patents to date.
ScaleIO already has dozens of installations at enterprise customers and
managed service providers, such as SAP (NYSE:SAP), Check Point Software
Technologies (NASDAQ:CHKP), Aer Lingus (LSE:AERL), and Colt (LSE:COLT).
About ScaleIO
ScaleIO is the leader in elastic converged storage. ECS, the flagship
ScaleIO solution, enables data centers to cut storage costs by over 80%
and streamlines storage operations by converging storage into compute.
Founded in early 2011 by a team of storage industry veterans who set out
to revolutionize enterprise data storage, the company is funded by
top-tier venture capital firms, including Greylock Partners and Norwest
Venture Partners (NVP). ECS is in use at large data centers in the
United States and Europe.
For more information, visit www.scaleio.com.
