Deal Alert: Nexus Ventures participates in $8.5 M 2nd round funding of open source storage firm Gluster
Edited Excerpts from the Press Release:
Milpitas, Calif. – November 9, 2010 – Gluster, the leading provider of open source scale-out storage solutions, today announced it has closed an $8.5 million Series B round of funding led by Index Ventures with participation from the previous investor, Nexus Venture Partners. Gluster has been experiencing dramatic growth worldwide in sales, partnerships, and community adoption, driven by the move to cloud based architectures, the explosion in unstructured data, and the increasing virtualization of the data center. With this new investment round, Gluster will expand its sales, marketing and support teams and allocate additional resources to partner development.
Multiple trends are driving Gluster’s growth across a wide-range of industry segments including healthcare, legal, media and hosting providers: Unstructured data is growing by 60 percent per year, creating a need for vastly different storage economics; over 20 percent of all compute workloads are now virtualized, creating a need for vastly different shared storage architectures; and, the cloud is expected to account for 14 percent of all IT spending by 2014, creating a need for storage that works both on-premise and in the cloud.
Gluster addresses these needs with a scale-out, open source, software-only storage solution that enables enterprises to manage petabytes of file data in a single volume across multiple storage servers. Gluster can be deployed using both on-premise commodity hardware and public cloud storage, delivering excellent performance across a wide range of workloads, including those found in highly virtualized compute environments. As a result, Gluster gives enterprises the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized, scale-on-demand pool in much the same way that they treat computing resources today, radically improving storage economics in the process.
"As the explosion in unstructured data continues, Gluster has demonstrated a unique capability to address challenges associated with managing massive amounts of data,” said Naren Gupta, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners and member of the Gluster board of directors. “Storage is emerging as the Achilles heel for virtualizing the data center and the move to the cloud. Gluster provides a hardware-agnostic, easily scalable storage solution that eliminates this road block and helps companies take advantage of the cloud’s true benefits. We are very excited to partner with the Gluster team to help create the next standard in scale-out storage.”
“We are gratified by the level of interest Gluster has received from investors, customers, and the community, and we are thrilled by the opportunity that this funding round gives us to accelerate growth,” said Ben Golub, president and CEO at Gluster.
About Nexus Venture Partners
Nexus Venture Partners (www.nexusvp.com) is India's leading venture capital fund, founded by successful entrepreneurs in India and Silicon Valley. It has $320m under management and an active portfolio of over 20 companies across technology, media, consumer, business services, energy and agribusiness sectors. The Nexus team plays an active role in helping entrepreneurs and management teams build market leading businesses. Some of the companies that Nexus has invested in include Komli (Internet advertisement network), Suminter (Organic farming), Dlight (Solar Lighting), DimDim (Open Source Web Conferencing), Mapmyindia (Digital Navigation), Deccan Pharma (Neutraceuticals), Gluster (Open source storage), WhatsonIndia (TV Guide), Cloud.com (Cloud infrastructure), Pubmatic (Publisher Ad revenue optimization), Prana (Animation services) and Netmagic (Internet Infrastructure). Investors in Nexus include leading university endowments, foundations and sovereign funds.
Milpitas, Calif. – November 9, 2010 – Gluster, the leading provider of open source scale-out storage solutions, today announced it has closed an $8.5 million Series B round of funding led by Index Ventures with participation from the previous investor, Nexus Venture Partners. Gluster has been experiencing dramatic growth worldwide in sales, partnerships, and community adoption, driven by the move to cloud based architectures, the explosion in unstructured data, and the increasing virtualization of the data center. With this new investment round, Gluster will expand its sales, marketing and support teams and allocate additional resources to partner development.
Multiple trends are driving Gluster’s growth across a wide-range of industry segments including healthcare, legal, media and hosting providers: Unstructured data is growing by 60 percent per year, creating a need for vastly different storage economics; over 20 percent of all compute workloads are now virtualized, creating a need for vastly different shared storage architectures; and, the cloud is expected to account for 14 percent of all IT spending by 2014, creating a need for storage that works both on-premise and in the cloud.
Gluster addresses these needs with a scale-out, open source, software-only storage solution that enables enterprises to manage petabytes of file data in a single volume across multiple storage servers. Gluster can be deployed using both on-premise commodity hardware and public cloud storage, delivering excellent performance across a wide range of workloads, including those found in highly virtualized compute environments. As a result, Gluster gives enterprises the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized, scale-on-demand pool in much the same way that they treat computing resources today, radically improving storage economics in the process.
"As the explosion in unstructured data continues, Gluster has demonstrated a unique capability to address challenges associated with managing massive amounts of data,” said Naren Gupta, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners and member of the Gluster board of directors. “Storage is emerging as the Achilles heel for virtualizing the data center and the move to the cloud. Gluster provides a hardware-agnostic, easily scalable storage solution that eliminates this road block and helps companies take advantage of the cloud’s true benefits. We are very excited to partner with the Gluster team to help create the next standard in scale-out storage.”
“We are gratified by the level of interest Gluster has received from investors, customers, and the community, and we are thrilled by the opportunity that this funding round gives us to accelerate growth,” said Ben Golub, president and CEO at Gluster.
About Nexus Venture Partners
Nexus Venture Partners (www.nexusvp.com) is India's leading venture capital fund, founded by successful entrepreneurs in India and Silicon Valley. It has $320m under management and an active portfolio of over 20 companies across technology, media, consumer, business services, energy and agribusiness sectors. The Nexus team plays an active role in helping entrepreneurs and management teams build market leading businesses. Some of the companies that Nexus has invested in include Komli (Internet advertisement network), Suminter (Organic farming), Dlight (Solar Lighting), DimDim (Open Source Web Conferencing), Mapmyindia (Digital Navigation), Deccan Pharma (Neutraceuticals), Gluster (Open source storage), WhatsonIndia (TV Guide), Cloud.com (Cloud infrastructure), Pubmatic (Publisher Ad revenue optimization), Prana (Animation services) and Netmagic (Internet Infrastructure). Investors in Nexus include leading university endowments, foundations and sovereign funds.