Cloudian, a provider of hybrid cloud object storage systems, has completed a $41 million financing round. The funding round includes new investors Lenovo, City National Bank, Epsilon Venture Partners, and DVP Investment. Also participating were all existing investors, including Intel Capital, INCJ, Eight Roads (the proprietary investment arm of FIL, Fidelity International Limited), and Goldman Sachs.
The new funds would fuel Cloudian‘s growth by accelerating innovation, expanding sales and marketing, and growing international operations to meet the “rapidly rising demand for scale-out, hybrid cloud object storage solutions.” The funding brings Cloudian’s total capital raised to date to $79 million.
“Data center managers need new solutions to help them contend with today’s explosive growth in unstructured data. Across all industries – from media, to medical, to industrial – new applications and technologies are driving 50 percent growth of unstructured data per year, creating a crisis of cost and complexity for storage managers,” said Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian. “Cloudian object storage redefines the enterprise data center with hybrid cloud solutions that bring the flexibility and simplicity of public cloud storage into our customer’s data centers, simplifying management and reducing TCO by 70 percent versus conventional storage systems.”
Based in Silicon Valley, Cloudian delivers its scale-out object storage solutions worldwide. The company’s flagship product, Cloudian HyperStore, provides enterprises and managed service provider with petabyte-scale storage, data protection, and smart analytics for use cases including backup/archive, media and entertainment, bioinformatics, IoT, and more.
“Connected devices are already generating millions of terabytes of information every day. The challenge is both to manage that information and to analyze and derive value from it,” said Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager, Data Center Marketing Group, Intel. “We believe Cloudian’s unified storage approach, which combines data management and data analytics in a single platform running on Intel Architecture, positions data center managers exceptionally well to extract value from the massive volumes of information created by accelerating device connectivity and advances in machine learning.”
In August, Cloudian announced the availability of Cloudian HyperStore on AWS Marketplace. This enables customers to purchase their on-premises storage on a metered-by-use basis, manage it alongside Amazon S3 storage as a single pool, and then receive a single invoice for both.
Furthermore, in June of this year, Cloudian and Lenovo announced an OEM agreement that enables Lenovo’s worldwide sales force to offer a Cloudian-based object storage appliance.
“Lenovo is committed to driving innovation, efficiency and investment protection into the datacenter,” said Peter Hortensius, chief technology and strategy officer, Data Center Group, Lenovo. “This is achieved through both internal development and through investing in partners with best-of-breed solutions. When researching for ways to address the explosive growth in data, Cloudian‘s storage solution, leveraging scalable x86 infrastructure, was the clear winner.”
