New Cold Storage Player SageCloud Raises $10 Million

More venture bets continue to be placed in the cloud storage space. SageCloud, a new player focused on cold storage, has raised a $10 million Series B round. SageCloud is from the founder of Carbonite, a sizeable cloud storage player that went public in 2011. The round was led by Braemar Energy Ventures and was joined by existing investor Matrix Partners.

SageCloud is focused on archival and backup storage needs and the increasing importance of Big Data analytics. The company's storage systems are engineered to address the growth of "cold data" -  data at the petabyte scale that is infrequently accessed. It aims to deliver what it calls "breakthrough price points" for Cold Storage Tiering that will align storage on disk with the price point of tape. To achieve these economics, SageCloud says it has integrated open source and proprietary software to resolve the data durability problems of commodity drives and leverage better power management designs of open stack enclosures.

"SageCloud has developed a differentiated solution for extremely low-cost cold data storage that does not compromise on long-term data preservation and improves substantially upon existing solutions from an efficiency standpoint," said Dr. Jiong Ma, Partner at Braemar, who will join the SageCloud Board of Directors.

"We’re seeing the potential for a big disruption to the storage industry coming from the disaggregation of software and hardware," said David Skok, General Partner, Matrix Partners and SageCloud board member. "Hardware prices are being driven down by open standard hardware (referred to as Infrastructure 2.0) and commoditized components.  Jeff and his team have spotted this opportunity, and created the software to allow enterprises and service providers to use this hardware for storage of their Cold Data at a fraction of the cost of other alternatives. Given the unrelenting growth in data that we’re seeing, we believe this has the potential to be a huge category."

A recently published report from IDC, power management is identified as a critical data center need and forecasts that the market for solutions to address energy-efficient data storage will exceed $25 billion by 2016.

In laymen’s terms, SageCloud is for the type of data that is written once and infrequently accessed.  The press release claims industry analysts believe as much as 80 percent of data qualifies as cold data, and that volume is growing. SageCloud Founder and CEO Jeff Flowers drew from his experience at Carbonite, a company he co-founded and helped lead as CTO, to identify the need for next gen cloud storage solutions.

"SageCloud has developed powerful system software which leverages open-standards enclosures and economical commodity drives to optimize energy efficiency, drive sustainability and long-term data preservation for customers’ data centers," said Flowers. "In this way, we are revolutionizing the economics of data storage."

"Jeff and his team bring a demonstrable track record of success in previous ventures and a wealth of expertise in data storage. We are excited to partner with this world-class firm, which Braemar believes has a chance to disrupt the enterprise market for intelligent data management and storage.”