Cloudian Raises $41M to Fuel Adoption of Storage Platform

Cloudian’s Amazon S3-compatible scale-out object storage platform and rapid market growth propel its smart data storage vision and go-to-market strategy

San Mateo, Calif. – October 27, 2016 – Cloudian, Inc., the leading 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. Also participating were all existing investors, including Intel Capital, INCJ, Eight Roads (the proprietary investment arm of FIL, Fidelity International Limited), and Goldman Sachs. The funding brings Cloudian’s 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 rapidly rising demand for scale-out, hybrid cloud object storage solutions.

“Data center 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 percent 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 center with hybrid cloud solutions that bring the flexibility and simplicity of public cloud storage into our customer’s data centers, simplifying management and reducing TCO by 70 percent versus conventional storage systems.”

Over the past year, Cloudian has rapidly accelerated customer acceptance with 300 percent increase in bookings, 100 percent growth in its customer base and 100 percent customer retention. Cloudian customers value the company’s modular, scale-out design that allows a single storage manager to effectively 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 analyze and derive value from it,” said Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager, Data Center Marketing Group, Intel. “We believe Cloudian’s unified storage approach, which combines data management and data analytics in a single platform running on Intel Architecture, positions data center 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.

Furthermore, in June of this year, Cloudian and Lenovo announced an OEM agreement that enables Lenovo’s worldwide salesforce to offer a Cloudian-based object storage appliance.

“Lenovo is committed to driving innovation, efficiency and investment protection into the datacenter,” 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 analyze this goldmine of data to find patterns that could enhance products or services,” says Amita Potnis, research manager, IDC. “Cloudian has tackled both problems with a scale-out design and an integrated insight engine that lets users store and analyze data on the same system. This combination changes the game in large-scale storage deployments.”

Earlier this year Cloudian announced HyperStore 6.0, a significant platform update that bolstered the product’s capabilities with proactive data repair, Amazon S3 cross-region replication for disaster recovery, 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.”

Cloudian HyperStore provides enterprises and managed service provider with petabyte-scale storage, data protection, and smart analytics for use cases including backup/archive, media and entertainment, bioinformatics, IoT, and more. HyperStore can scale from just three nodes to hundreds, allowing systems to be right-sized for any application or organizational need. Cloudian solutions are available as an appliance or as stand-alone software for commodity hardware, and may be configured with a file connector that facilitates CIFS, NFS and FTP services. For more information, please visit: www.cloudian.com.

About Cloudian
Based in Silicon Valley, Cloudian is the leader in scale-out object storage. Our flagship product, Cloudian HyperStore, enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions. Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter (@CloudianStorage) and Facebook, or visit us at www.cloudian.com.