… $12 Million for Astute Networks in Series B …

Astute Networks, Inc. closed financing in an over-subscribed $12 million Series B funding round led by Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), the investment arm of Samsung Group, provider of NAND flash memory.

Current investors Tallwood Venture Capital and Narra Venture Capital also contributed to the round, with participation from new investors Ayala Capital, ICCP Venture Partners, and TIFF (The Investment Fund for Foundations).

Astute will utilize the funding to further expand global sales, marketing, channel development, and support efforts, as well as ongoing innovation of its patented DataPump Engine, Networked Performance Flash, and related technologies found in the company’s ViSX family of flash optimized appliances.

According to IDC, 2011 was a record year for the worldwide SSD market that grew 105% over 2010 to $5 billion. The firm forecasts strong growth through 2015 with the increasing use of SSDs, a trend the research company expects to continue as prices fall and performance increases.

Led by storage networking veteran and CEO Steve Topper, Astute Networks is positioned to capitalize on the SSD market.

Performance Acceleration Flash Solutions
Patented DataPump Engine and Networked Performance Flash architecture was designed to deliver tightly fused, performance, low power solutions that accelerate virtual machine and application performance on major virtualization platforms including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat RHEV. By complementing existing SAN or NAS infrastructures, with an additive optimized flash-based datastore tier, ViSX satisfies the performance requirements demanded by today’s mission and business critical applications such as VDI, cloud computing, and big data. Network-based, ViSX provisions 100,000 IOPS with 100% sustained random I/O performance, that is shareable by all virtual machines on all hosts over standard 10GbE or 1GbE networks – all in a small footprint, multi-terabyte, and rack mount device.  

With ViSX, virtualized organizations can:

• Eliminate I/O bottlenecks – the ‘funnel effect’ – typically experienced with server virtualization
• Eliminate the cost of over-provisioning traditional storage to achieve higher IOPS
• Virtualize more tier one applications with sustained performance
• Lower CapEx and OpEx and achieve ROI with TCO

"The flash memory and virtualization expertise of the Astute Networks team, together with a deep understanding of storage and networking as evidenced by their patented DataPump Engine, puts them in an excellent position to deliver highly differentiated and competitive solutions for virtualized environments," said Dr. Dong-Su Kim, senior director, Samsung Venture Investment Corp. "Samsung Ventures is excited to lead this latest round of funding for the company."

"We recognize the strategic importance of virtualization and storage in the enterprise and cloud, as well as new growth opportunities in big data and the need for predictable performance with capacity and scalability. Astute Networks’ patented technology is highly effective and we believe the company will continue to disrupt the market," said George Pavlov, general partner, Tallwood Venture Capital.

Since introducing ViSX, Astute Networks has won several awards and recognition, including the 2011 Flash Memory Summit Best of Show Award for Most Innovative Flash Memory Customer Implementation and a Forbes.com article titled VMware Stock Ready to Race to $111 highlighting the ability of ViSX to alleviate virtualization performance problems and further drive the adoption of VMware virtualization services.

"Our first ViSX G3 deployment gave us a 1,500% boost in performance on critical business applications compared to our existing virtualized SAN," commented Walt Thinfen, CIO of Visioneer, Inc. "Now, company productivity and efficiency are way up and our employees can more quickly access business-critical databases and applications such as SAP, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SharePoint like never before."

"Samsung Ventures leading this round of funding is a most welcome endorsement of our patented DataPump Engine and Networked Performance Flash intellectual property," said Steve Topper, CEO of Astute Networks. "It puts the fuel in the engine, enabling us to fully support our growing family of channel partners and end customers, extend our technical capabilities and aggressively expand our market reach and footprint worldwide."