Out of Stealth Mode Acunu Closed $3.6 Million Series A

Data storage specialist Acunu announced the closing of £2.2M ($3.6M) Series A financing to help bring its first product to market.

The London-based company also announced that its first product, the Acunu Storage Platform, is in private beta with companies in areas including social media, advertising and cloud computing.

Acunu provides software to address the challenges of storing, processing and serving very large amounts of data at low cost – a fast-growing area known as ‘Big Data’.

It combines existing Big Data tools with a re-architecting of the storage stack that extracts higher, more predictable performance and reliability from commodity hardware – making it thousands of times faster than even high-end conventional databases.

"Acunu tackles some of the hardest challenges in Big Data, both for start-ups and for large enterprises, reducing time to market and increasing performance," Tim Moreton, CEO of Acunu, said. "This funding will support our growth and speed the adoption of our technology".

Acunu provides developers with a familiar interface by using a modified version of Apache Cassandra, an open-source database based on systems used at Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Acunu’s instant thin clones, a first for a Big Data solution, improves agility and reduces deployment risk by letting each developer work with isolated copies of production datasets, however large. Its tools take complexity out of managing and monitoring and let developers focus on their applications and their data.

Acunu’s investors include Eden Ventures, Oxford Technology Management and Pentech Ventures LLP, UK-based venture capital firms specialising in early stage and start-up companies, along with support from Finance Southeast and the Carbon Trust. Pentech numbers the European Investment Fund among its investors.

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Acunu was founded in 2009 by researchers from Cambridge and Oxford Universities to tackle the complexity of Big Data. "It allows growing storage demands to be met with fewer computers, less power, and lower cost," said the start-up. "It can be deployed in organizations' own data centers or in the cloud."

The Acunu Storage Platform combines a storage engine based on patented algorithms along with a management interface for scale-out deployment and cluster management.

Its main technology is based on these algorithmics lightning fast updates with full versioning. "Handling lots of small random updates to fully-versioned data is hard. Acunu’s algorithms are the first major advance since classical copy-on-write techniques and allow query/update trade-offs that were previously not possible. Use versioning to lower risk and speed development, at the same time as benefiting from superb throughput under heavy load," explained the company.

RAID is not used but randomized disk layouts offering "provably hotspot-free load balancing", and parallel rebuilds that can rebuild 2TB HDDs in hours. MLC SSDs are used for Big Data workloads that need random I/O performance.

Acunu's total funding now stands at £3.1 million ($5.0 million).

CEO Tim Moreton is specialized in distributed file systems, being previously at Tideway (now BMC) where he led the creation of tools for managing data centers.

CTO Andy Twigg is an expert of theoretical and applied computing research, with a PhD in 2006 on compact routing algorithms. He has held positions at Cambridge University, Microsoft Research, Thompson Research and Oxford University.

VP Engineering Tom Wilkie was one of the first UK employees at XenSource before its acquisition by Citrix in 2007.

Advisor Dr. John Wilkes led the Storage Systems group at HP Labs for 15 years, before moving to Google in 2008.