$16 million Series C Funding for Exablox

Exablox Corp. has received a $16 million Series-C funding round.

Dell Ventures is now a strategic investor, joining existing investors DCM Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners.

This investment validates Exablox’s vision for delivering scale-out object storage to every organization.

The company has now received $38.5 million in total funding.

The recent IDC Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2014-2018 Forecast Report projects that the file-and-object-based storage market will be $43.4 billion in 2018. IDC also states that by 2018 scale-out solutions will account for approximately 80% of the FOBS market.

With traditional models storage often has been purchased on a three- to four-year refresh cycle, forcing IT organizations to overprovision storage in anticipation of future business needs, which often results in forklift upgrades as business requirements change. This antiquated approach does not fit in an era of overwhelming growth in unstructured data, big data and the Internet of Things. Exablox’s OneBlox scale-out architecture provides a scalable solution that eliminates forklift upgrades and enables IT organizations to nearly instantaneously scale storage capacity, performance and/or availability to exactly meet their current business needs.

The demand for OneBlox object-based storage solution has resulted in more than a 13-fold year-over-year increase in both customers and number of appliances sold. The company has seen traction across a range of industries including higher education, legal, medical and manufacturing organizations.

Exablox has developed its own object-store that is integrated with a distributed file system delivering rich enterprise features such as inline deduplication, CDP, remote replication and seamless scalability to SMB and NFS-based applications. The result is a storage product that is simpler to deploy and manage than legacy storage solutions. Most tasks require zero-configuration and are completed in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days.

Exablox’s OneSystem is a cloud-based storage management application. It has saved hours for organizations by providing anywhere, anytime access for storage configuration, management and monitoring tasks. With the ability to perform all storage management tasks from anywhere in the world, OneSystem is giving storage administrators a new level of freedom in serving their users.
 
Exablox is led by CEO Douglas Brockett, former VP and GM of SonicWALL. He played a key role in establishing SonicWALL in the advanced network security space. SonicWALL was acquired by Dell in 2012 for $1.2 billion.

“Exablox has a unique storage architecture that delivers the benefits of object-based storage to the mid-market, without the associated complexity,” says Alan Atkinson, VP and GM, Dell storage. “OneBlox offers a powerful, yet simple, solution that enables IT organizations to rapidly deploy systems and applications.“

“With the realities of the changing data landscape, the many limitations of legacy scale-up storage architectures based on RAID are putting IT organizations’ storage infrastructure at a breaking point. Exablox has broken away from the legacy mindset with its mid-market storage offering,” said Simon Robinson, research VP, 451 Research. “OneBlox combines the best of both worlds. It offers all of the benefits of object storage: scale-out, cost effectiveness and commodity hardware support, with the ubiquitous NFS and SMB file system access, simply delivered in an appliance.”

“The reality is that the storage technologies that have served organizations over the last few decades will not solve the business problems of the future,” said Brockett, CEO, Exablox. “Legacy storage vendors have held on to the old way of doing things for far too long, and the market is correcting itself. We believe storage should be as dynamic as the business it serves.”