Sep14Written by:SuperUser Account
9/14/2010 8:09 AM 
StorSimple to Accelerate Expansion Plans in High-Growth Cloud Storage Market
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--StorSimple announced today that it has raised $13 million in Series B funding round led by Mayfield Fund, bringing the company’s total funding to $21 million. Participation in this round included new investor Ignition Partners and both existing investors: Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. Funds from Series B will be used to expand sales, support and product operations while keeping focus on optimizing secure, high-performance, high-availability hybrid cloud storage for Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange 2010, File Services, and Virtual Machine environments.
“We have been an early investor in StorSimple and saw the market potential from day one”
“Mayfield, as the original investor in 3PAR, knows the cloud storage market is a once-in-a-decade disruption,” stated Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield Fund. “Enterprises want the best-of-both worlds: the instant, elastic provisioning of the cloud that is available from anywhere with low-cost utility billing while still being able to give users familiar applications such as Exchange and SharePoint with the same security and at least the same performance. The StorSimple application-optimized cloud storage appliance securely integrates the cloud into familiar enterprise applications without forcing companies to move their applications into the cloud.”
“We understand the Microsoft ecosystem very well,” said Richard Fade, partner at Ignition Partners. “SharePoint is the fastest-growing Microsoft server product ever. Companies want to expand its usage from small collaboration databases to multi-terabyte databases that were previously the domain of multi-million dollar content management systems. StorSimple with its SharePoint Optimizer is able to do this, reducing database size by up to 95 percent and storage requirements by up to 80 percent. This dramatically improves high-scale SharePoint performance and has out-of-the-box integration with Azure. Users can also get the familiarity of Outlook/Exchange and the ‘unlimited storage’ of hosted email, as StorSimple enables PST files to move to Exchange 2010 Personal Archives that can be securely stored in the cloud.”
“The last decade created great virtualization companies based on the fact that typical CPU utilization was at 5 percent,” said Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. “Today, storage utilization is often at 10 percent to 25 percent. This decade will create great companies that will combine the instant provisioning of the cloud with the security and performance of enterprise storage. We believe StorSimple will be the leaders in this hybrid cloud storage category.”
“We have been an early investor in StorSimple and saw the market potential from day one,” said Satish Dharmaraj, partner with Redpoint Ventures. “We see 20 percent to 40 percent of storage moving to the cloud, and StorSimple will drive massive enterprise revenue to leading cloud providers such as Amazon, AT&T, EMC and Microsoft, putting it at the forefront of the cloud integration into the enterprise.”
“Feedback from our customers and partners confirmed that we are in the right part of this high-growth market,” said Ursheet Parikh, founder and CEO of StorSimple. “Their feedback convinced us that we had to accelerate growth plans and establish our leadership position in hybrid cloud storage.”
StorSimple is a next-generation hybrid cloud storage appliance that securely integrates the cloud into enterprise applications without forcing users to put their enterprise applications into the cloud. Customers get the instant thin provisioning, elastic expansion, and utility billing of the public cloud with the speed and security of primary storage. The unique tiered storage and weighted storage layout combined with encryption and real-time de-duplication mean that the StorSimple solution can be used securely for primary application content and backup or archival over a WAN. More information about the StorSimple solution and its benefits in today’s environments is available at http://www.storsimple.com/wp-overview.
About StorSimple
StorSimple has developed an application-optimized hybrid cloud storage solution for SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Files Services, Virtual Machines, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure that delivers consistent storage performance at scale, significantly simplifies data protection, and reduces cost by up to 90 percent compared to traditional enterprise storage used with these applications. StorSimple is based in Silicon Valley and is funded by Ignition Partners, Index Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Redpoint Ventures. To register for a trial of the StorSimple application-optimized cloud storage appliance, go to: http://www.storsimple.com/try.