ScaleIO Secures $12 Million

ScaleIO, Inc., in software-defined storage, has raised $12 million from Greylock IL Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, 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.

It eliminates the dependence on complex, expensive external SAN and fabric by presenting business application servers’ local disks as a 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, Inc. 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, SVP at SAP AG, 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 TCO for enterprise grade storage."

Dror Nahumi, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, added: "The ScaleIO team has extensive experience in building advanced storage software products and proven success in taking them to market."

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, Check Point Software Technologies, Aer Lingus, and Colt.