Cloudian Raises $41 Million

Cloudian, Inc., provider of hybrid cloud object storage systems, has completed a $41 million financing round.

The round includes new investors Lenovo, City National Bank, Epsilon Venture Partners, and DVP Investment, Inc. Also participating were all existing investors, including Intel Capital, Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, Eight Roads Ventures (the proprietary investment arm of FIL, Fidelity International Limited), and Goldman Sachs.

The funding brings total capital raised to date to $79 million.
 
The new funds will fuel the company’s growth by accelerating innovation, expanding sales and marketing, and growing international operations to meet the rising demand for scale-out, hybrid cloud object storage solutions.  
 
“Data centre managers need new solutions to help them contend with today’s explosive growth in unstructured data. Across all industries – from media, to medical, to industrial – new applications and technologies are driving 50% growth of unstructured data per year, creating a crisis of cost and complexity for storage managers,” said Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder, Cloudian. “Cloudian object storage redefines the enterprise data centre with hybrid cloud solutions that bring the flexibility and simplicity of public cloud storage into our customer’s data centres, simplifying management and reducing TCO by 70% versus conventional storage systems.”
 
Over the past year, Cloudian has accelerated customer acceptance with 300% increase in bookings, and 100% growth in its customer base with 100% customer retention. Customers value the company’s modular, scale-out design that allows a single storage manager to manage hundreds of petabytes of capacity, a level that would require a dozen or more storage managers with conventional systems.
 
“Connected devices are already generating millions of terabytes of information every day. The challenge is both to manage that information and to analyse and derive value from it,” said Lisa Spelman, VP and GM of Intel’s data center marketing group. “We believe Cloudian’s unified storage approach, which combines data management and data analytics in a single platform running on Intel architecture, positions data centre managers exceptionally well to extract value from the massive volumes of information created by accelerating device connectivity and advances in machine learning.”
 
In August, Cloudian announced the availability of Cloudian HyperStore on AWS Marketplace. This enables customers to purchase their on-premises storage on a metered-by-use basis, manage it alongside Amazon S3 storage as a single pool, and then receive a single invoice for both.
 
In June of this year, Cloudian and Lenovo announced an OEM agreement that enables Lenovo’s worldwide sales force to offer a Cloudian-based object storage appliance.
 
“Lenovo is committed to driving innovation, efficiency and investment protection into the datacentre,” said Peter Hortensius, chief technology and strategy officer, data center group, Lenovo. “This is achieved through both internal development and through investing in partners with best of breed solutions. When researching for ways to address the explosive growth in data, Cloudian’s storage solution, leveraging scalable x86 infrastructure, was the clear winner.”
 
On October 20, Google announced Google Cloud Storage Coldline, a long-term archival storage service. Cloudian is integrated with Coldline, allowing customers to create a hybrid storage environment for rapid data access and nearly instantaneous search. Users store and retrieve data from the Cloudian system on-premises, while applying policies for automatic data migration to Coldline. When data is migrated, metadata is retained within the Cloudian system, allowing Coldline-stored data to be searched locally to accelerate data discovery. Administrators manage all their data, whether on-premises or in the cloud, as a single storage pool.
 
“Until recently the focus for most storage administrators was to store and manage large amounts of data. Businesses are now looking to analyse this goldmine of data to find patterns that could enhance products or services,” says Amita Potnis, IDC research manager. “Cloudian has tackled both problems with a scale-out design and an integrated insight engine that lets users store and analyse data on the same system. This combination changes the game in large-scale storage deployments.”
 
Earlier this year Cloudian announced HyperStore 6.0, a platform update that bolstered the product’s capabilities with proactive data repair, Amazon S3 cross-region replication for DR, and smart storage features to expand the product’s in-platform analytics capabilities.
 
“The challenge of long-term data management is evolving way beyond simply accommodating storage capacity,” said Steven Hill, senior storage analyst, 451 Research. “While storing and protecting data remain primary considerations, metadata is the key to extending the value of business data throughout its entire lifecycle. The rich metadata capabilities offered by object storage technology like Cloudian’s HyperStore platform, combines massive scalability with detailed and purposeful information about the data itself, whether on-prem or in the cloud.”