Cleversafe Raises $55 Million For Storage Disruption at Petabyte Scale

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A closer look at several of Cleversafe's storage servers, the Slicestor 2200 (2U form factor) and Slicestor 1440 (4U form factor).

Cleversafe believes it is disrupting the economics of storage at Petabyte-scale. The company delivers a combination of analytics and storage in a geographically distributed single system, allowing organizations to scale big data environments to hundreds of petabytes, and even Exabytes. The company has grown its customer base by 75 percent in the last 12 months, and announced today that it has secured $55 million in funding to support its growth.

The oversubscribed Series D round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from all major existing investors as well as new investor New World Ventures. The money will go to support Cleversafe's growth, as well as help it expand into new vertical market segments. It will also boost product development efforts to deliver solutions in conjunction with leading industry partners to help customers reduce storage costs.

"Cleversafe is way ahead of the innovation curve in storage technology," said Peter Barris, the Managing General Partner of NEA, who will join Cleversafe's board. "Today, the company is seeing demand for its cost-efficient storage solution from an entirely new class of customer across a growing set of verticals. This demand will only accelerate with an ever-increasing volume of data being generated, and there is no better time for a company with the right technology to step forward to solve today’s business challenges."

More Than 200 Petabytes Shipped

The company has so far shipped more than 200 petabytes of storage capacity, which Cleversafe notes is the equivalent of the entire written works of mankind from the beginning of recorded history - in all languages, times four.

Cleversafe appointed John Morris to CEO in May to help guide the company during this next stage of growth.

"There is a fast-growing hunger for efficient, cost-effective solutions to manage massive volumes of data, and Cleversafe’s solution completely disrupts the economics of storage at Petabyte-scale," said Morris. "Our proven technology is displacing legacy boxes that were designed for yesterday’s storage needs across a wide range of industries. What they have in common is breakneck growth in storage needs that were being poorly addressed by old-fashioned products from EMC and others. There are thousands of customers like that and with this round of funding, we’ll expand our coverage of the market so that we can get to many more of them."

Most recently, the company has advanced combined storage and computation with Hadoop MapReduce, significantly reducing customers’ infrastructure costs for separate servers dedicated to analytical processes.

The company’s flagship product is dsNet object storage system, which protects both data and metadata equally. The company says dsNet is more reliable and more efficient than traditional RAID-based storage systems. It uses unique Information Dispersal technology to slice and disperse data, so that single points of failure and centralized synchronization points are eliminated. As data is distributed evenly across all storage nodes, metadata can scale linearly and infinitely as new nodes are added, thus reducing any scalability bottlenecks and increasing performance and reliability.

The company focuses on delivering high performance dispersed object storage solutions across multiple classes of storage to address more demanding customer workloads. It provides scalability to customers don’t have to worry about outgrowing their storage.