News

posted on 26 April 2008 08:15

Storage virtualisation vendor DataCore has taken in $30 million from a funding round to help strengthen its channel sales in the USA and expand its virtualisation partnering efforts.

The company is under-represented in the USA in terms of sales with around 60 percent of customers in Europe. Its SANmelody and SANsymphony products provide virtualised block storage for iSCSI and Fibre Channel with thin provisioning and continuous data protection. The coming SANharmony product adds a file storage capability.

The company's total funding is now $100 million and two new investors came on board for this latest round: Insight Venture Partners and Updata Partners.

DataCore celebrated its tenth anniversary at CEBIT in February.

It has a large number of small and mid-tier enterprise customers, such as Amberg Hospital in Germany, plus larger enterprise customers as well.  The company's products are also well-integrated with server virtualisation products.

The offering of combined block and file storage facilities has been done by providing a network-attached storage (NAS) head product in front of a storage area network (SAN). Suppliers like Reldata supply a single dedicated server that provides both access routes, file and block, to the drive arrays.

The concept has not, it's fair to say, yet taken off in a significant way. It's appeal is that one consolidated and shared pool of storage can provide all the file and block storage needs an organisation has with increases in drive array utilisation, lower management costs, better data protection, and lower product acquisition costs.

While Nexsan, a hardware and software storage vendor, has filed for an IPO, DataCore appears to be in no hurry to crystalise its venture capital backers' investments through an IPO. Company CEO George Teixeira has indicated the company's willingness to be acquired if the right offer comes along.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}