Based in San Francisco, CA, Jut, Inc. has secured $20 million in series B financing.

Accel Partners led the investment round, with participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners and Wing Venture Partners.

In stealth mode, Jut has built a vision around the future of big data applications.

"It's now clear that open source big data is changing the way information infrastructure is architected for scale and cost," said Steve McCanne, founder and CEO, Jut. "But the real opportunity lies in rethinking how enterprise applications are architected so they can make sense out of the massive volumes of big data."

"By 2016, analysts predict that big data will drive upwards of $200 billion in IT spending. The bulk of that spending won't be on the underlying infrastructure; it will be on products and services that derive meaning from the data. Jut lives above big data infrastructure and provides a better way for enterprises to capture, analyze, and derive insight from complex data," said Apurva Dave, VP marketing, Jut.

Jut was founded by a team that builds companies around category-defining technology. Steve McCanne co-founded Riverbed and grew the company to a billion dollar revenue run-rate. He previously co-founded FastForward Networks, acquired by Inktomi and now a part of Yahoo.

The management team includes:

• Steve McCanne, CEO
• Larry Castro, CFO
• Mike Demmer, VP engineering
• Apurva Dave, VP marketing

Jut will use the capital to expand its engineering team and bring the first version of its product to market. It is creating a development-driven company with an open-source oriented culture; data based decision-making, and deceptively elegant answers to today's hardest questions.

Jut is hiring JavaScript developers and big data scientists.

ProphetStor Data Services, Inc., in software-defined storage, emerged from stealth mode and announced Federator, which brings operational flexibility and cost savings to OpenStack cloud computing, big data analytics, HPC, and day-to-day storage demanding applications.

Data growth and longer retention times have increased the burden on data centers, sending IT departments scrambling to accommodate increasingly diversified storage demands from virtualization and big data analytics to regulation compliance (for example, data protection and archiving). Unplanned storage array acquisitions entail expensive migrations, and it only gets worse as budgets shrink.

"Storage has to change to meet these challenges with higher efficiency and better agility," says Eric Chen, CEO of ProphetStor and from 2010 to 2012 VP and GM, AsiaPac ops, FalconStor.

Other executives include Peter Liu, VP professional services, formerly with the same position at FalconStor, and Steve Tan, VP engineering, previously co-founder and CTO of Cloudena, VP engineering at Ciphermax (formerly Maxxan), and previously at Maxtor, Nihan Systems and Micropolis.

ProphetStor Federator frees storage users from complex, expensive external SAN storage and fabric with its storage federation technology, which provides automatic discovery, pooling, classification, abstraction, and provisioning. Along with its support of QoS through IO/s provisioning, standard SMI-S, CDMI, and vendor- specific APIs protocols, the solution makes scalability and enterprise-grade resilience efficient while reducing storage costs.

"ProphetStor Federator unifies data operations across block storage arrays, and supports iSCSI and FC protocols," explained Chen. "ProphetStor Federator is the only answer on the market today to build a scale-out storage tier mixing legacy storage arrays with x86 commodity servers. Storage will become as inconspicuous as networks or servers. Our goal is to drive the total storage cost down and helps CIO's meet corporate storage demand by bringing equality and freedom to their choices of storage solutions."

With OpenStack adoption on the rise, ProphetStor joins the players to provide a robust storage solution to the OpenStack community. Federator allows a cloud administrator to add, move, or remove storage servers and capacity on demand. It responds to any infrastructure change automatically and puts the control back to OpenStack users, while maintaining performance.

Without waiting for budget cycles for buying new storage arrays, Federator adopts and repurposes legacy storage arrays, and/or commodity servers, to kick start OpenStack deployments. Its performance scales linearly with the number of storage servers and disks.

Federator can be managed from either OpenStack Horizon or REST API over http. Initially available on Ubuntu, supports will extend to all the Linux distributions in the future; and it works agnostically with storage systems, regardless of type, model, or speed, giving organizations freedom of choices in storage.

Federator targets to deploy in a variety of environments, including VDIs, high-performance databases, and public or private clouds.

Federator demo is available with official release in Q1, 2014.

ProphetStor was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Milpitas, CA with branch offices in Taiwan.

To read this article from NDTV Gadgets, click on:
Box cloud storage firm set for 2014 IPO, selects banks: Report
Storage company Box, one of the most highly anticipated IPO candidates in Silicon Valley, has selected banks to lead a proposed IPO that could come in the first half of 2014, according to three people familiar with the matter. The fast-growing technology start-up has selected Morgan Stanley , Credit Suisse and JPMorgan Chase & Co to lead the offering that could raise around $500 million, the people said.

Read also:
Box Targets IPO
In 2014

UK start-up CloudFind Ltd. has attracted a further 460k of investment for its plans to transform how companies find, share and organize their information.

This latest equity investment takes Cloudfinds funding to date to over 700k ($1m).

Cloudfinds technology addresses an issue that every company recognizes: how to find the right information quickly from thousands of folders and millions of files.

"The potential to save time and cost, and streamline day to day operations for businesses of all kinds is simply huge," commented Cloudfind CEO, Sebastian Toke-Nichols.

Companies are finding it difficult to keep information organized, even with sophisticated search and collaboration tools. Growing volumes of enterprise files and the rapid growth in cloud storage only add to the complexity.

"Conventional methods for searching and organizing information are becoming increasingly inadequate," Toke-Nichols added. "Its like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks."

Cloudfind solves the problem with algorithms that automatically and intelligently tag information and documents from across cloud storage providers, such as Google Drive, Box and Dropbox. To find the files they need, users click on tags, rather than having to review long lists of search results or browse through folders. By integrating with enterprise applications such as Salesforce.com, Cloudfind makes the process more seamless, saving valuable time.

Toke-Nichols added: "This additional funding demonstrates the huge interest and potential in this area, and a vote of confidence in Cloudfind from experienced technology investors. The company plans to recruit up to 20 additional staff during 2014 to develop its technology further and tap worldwide market potential."

Cloudfind will be in San Francisco, November 18-21 for Dreamforce, a vendor-led event attracting 120,000 Salesforce users, customers and partners.

Established in 2011, Cloudfind partners with Salesforce implementers and resellers to provide solutions in multiple verticals including financial services, real estate, pharmaceuticals and healthcare.

The company is headquartered in Bath, UK.

Quorum, Inc., provider of backup, recovery and continuity for the midmarket, has raised $10 million in Series C funding to support the company in the DRaaS market.

The round was led by Toba Capital and joined by Airtek Capital Group and angel investors.

Like the Series B round completed in March, proceeds from this funding round will be used to expand sales and marketing of Quorum's one-click backup, recovery, and continuity appliance and DRaaS solutions. Monies will also be set aside to support engineering with additional headcount to increase productivity as demand grows.

This latest round of funding is marked by a shift in leadership and an addition to its board that reflect the company's rapid and aggressive growth.

 Walter Angerer, a venture partner at Toba Capital, has stepped in as interim CEO, bringing with him experience in the DR industry, as well as a penchant for innovation that falls in line with Quorum's own. Prior to his position at Toba Capital, he served as SVP and GM for Quest Data Protection. He also held a number of positions at Symantec, including VP responsible for NetBackup engineering.

In addition, Paul Sallaberry will join Quorum's board of directors, bringing with him decades of experience in helping early-stage companies achieve exponential growth. Over the years, he has served on a number of boards, including Quest Software, Acquia and Moovweb. His expertise in worldwide sales, marketing and services will help drive forward Quorum's one-click backup, recovery and continuity technology as the company prepares for its next phase of growth.

According to market research company MarketandMarkets, the global DRaaS and BC market is estimated to grow from $640.8 million this year to $5.77 billion by 2018. This represents a CAGR of 55.2% over the time period.

"The demand for innovative DR solutions that minimize downtime is fueling unprecedented growth in the DRaaS market," said Angerer. "The new funding means we can focus additional efforts on advancing our DRaaS and appliance solutions and increasing our market presence globally to adequately meet this opportunity."

Quorum's one-click backup, recovery and continuity DRaaS and appliance solutions have been lauded by industry luminaries as "disruptive," challenging traditional DR solutions from the likes of Symantec, EMC and other legacy players. Its ability to provide assured, one-click recovery in minutes is a boon to midmarket businesses, for which one hour of downtime can cost almost $216,000, according to Aberdeen Group.

Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Maxta, Inc. unveiled a virtualization-centric storage platform that eliminates the need for external storage arrays and simplifies IT, while delivering cost savings.

The new software platform enables the convergence of compute and storage on standard servers leveraging server-side flash and disk drives to optimize performance and capacity. It supports all server virtualization capabilities that depend on shared storage and delivers enterprise data services, capacity optimization and scale-out of storage and performance.

"The complexities and high costs of traditional enterprise storage are magnified in the virtual data center," said Yoram Novick, founder and CEO, Maxta. "After being told repeatedly that expensive storage arrays are the only way to support enterprise applications in virtualized environments, IT organizations finally have an alternative to storage arrays that reduces complexity and cost. Maxta has broken the code for integrating storage and compute into a converged virtual data center."

The Maxta Storage Platform (MxSP) is a hypervisor-agnostic implementation of enterprise storage. It integrates with server virtualization at all levels from user interface to data management, while supporting all possible deployments of virtual data centers, including private, public and hybrid clouds. Through its software-only solution, Maxta turns standard servers into a converged compute and storage solution. This results in simplicity, economics and availability over decades-old external storage arrays.

According to Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG, "Maxta offers all the critical features that enterprise users are typically demanding of the storage infrastructure in their virtualized environments. But, rather than being just another rack or cabinet based storage system, the Maxta solution can essentially be seen as a server-based storage app; as such it's a perfect fit for an increasingly converged, and yet heterogeneous, world where easy to deploy and use software management is crucial from both operational and economic viewpoints."

MxSP delivers snapshot and clone technology. It supports an unlimited number of VM-level snapshots and zero copy clones instantly without performance degradation, providing data protection without impacting production applications and instant provisioning of new VMs using VM templates. VM-level replication provides fast and affordable HA and DR.

MxSP is optimized to utilize flash performance and HDD capacity, eliminating the need for IT administrators to make difficult tradeoffs between performance and cost. It leverages any combination of magnetic disk drives and flash technology - including SATA, SAS and PCIe attached - to deliver performance and capacity at an attractive price for virtualized workloads.

Cost is further reduced by eliminating power, cooling and floorspace expenses of storage arrays. MxSP employs capacity optimization capabilities like thin provisioning, inline compression and de-duplication to reduce the data footprint, improving effective storage capacity and reducing cost. It provides the ability to scale compute and storage independently on-demand, one standard server at a time without having to over-provision resources. Additionally, it co-exists with other storage solutions providing investment protection for customers.

"We have been deploying Maxta in our data center and remote offices for quite some time. Maxta provided all the enterprise storage capabilites that we need without purchasing a storage array," said Soumitra Ghosh, director of IT, Driscoll Strawberry Associates, Inc. "We appreciate the ease of installation and simplicity of operation that Maxta is delivering by completely integrating our virtualized servers as well as the rich set of VM level features."

"Maxta enabled our test and development teams to self-deploy and manage VMs accelerating time to market of applications and increased storage performance by 50% over our iSCSI array," said Michael Leland, virtual infrastructure manager, VSS Monitoring Inc., a Danaher company (a Fortune 200 company). "From an IT perspective, it has also reduced the amount of time I spend on mundane, day to day storage management tasks."

"Maxta is all about software eating the storage array and profoundly changing the cost and complexity characteristics of the virtual data center," said Peter Levine, partner, Andreessen Horowitz. "Creating a full-feature storage array through software alone has been one of the holy grails of the storage industry. Maxta is fundamentally changing the storage landscape."

Maxta was founded by experienced entrepreneur Novick. He previously founded Topio, provider of platform-agnostic enterprise data replication solutions and served as Topio CEO from its inception until it was acquired by NetApp.

Maxta has raised $10 million from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth-stage funding to new technology companies.

To read this article from The New York Times, click on:
Dropbox Is Said to Seek $250 Million in Funding, Doubling Its Valuation
Dropbox, a five-year-old San Francisco start-up that allows users to access stored documents via the web, is seeking $250 million in funding in a round that would value it at more than $8 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

SimpliVity Corporation has secured $58 million in Series C funding co-led by existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) Growth and DFJ Growth, and joined by Meritech Capital Partners and Swisscom Ventures, as well as existing investors Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures.

The funding follows a year in which SimpliVity emerged in the growing market for infrastructure for virtualized environments, on the strength of its game changing global data architecture-the that delivers inline, accelerated deduplication, compression, and optimization of all data across a global federated framework that allows for the highly efficient movement, accessibility, and management of data around the globe.

This transformational technology allows companies large and small to simplify their infrastructure environments while gaining 3X TCO savings, and achieving improvements in functionality, data protection, and manageability.

2013 saw the market adoption of OmniCube around the globe as companies large and small recognized the opportunity to simplify and improve their IT infrastructure.

"SimpliVity is one of the biggest innovations in enterprise computing since VMware," commented John Doerr, general partner of Kleiner Perkins, and early backer of Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Google, and Amazon. "Its OmniCube is simplifying IT infrastructure with systems that are better, faster, smaller and less expensive than competitive offerings. SimpliVity is well positioned to transform IT."

"We invest in category leaders addressing large market opportunities. SimpliVity offers breakthrough price/performance and unprecedented manageability for companies deploying VM and cloud environments. As companies of all sizes continue their migration to virtualization and cloud computing, we see a wonderful opportunity for SimpliVity's products to be used as 'Lego-like' building blocks to build, expand and simplify IT operations in mid-size companies, large enterprises - especially those with remote offices -, and cloud service providers as well. Furthermore, we are extremely impressed with the sophistication and high level of professionalism of SimpliVity's management team and their intense focus on making their customers successful," commented Mark Bailey, MD of DFJ Growth, investors in Box, Yammer, AdMob, Good Technology, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, SpaceX and other world-changing companies.

SimpliVity emerged from stealth mode in August 2012 with the introduction of OmniCube

In addition to building out its customer base and channel network across the globe, SimpliVity recently achieved the top honor at VMworld, winning Gold for Best of VMworld 2013.

OmniCube is currently installed across a range of companies and use cases-from small environments with dozens of VMs to some of the world's largest global cloud providers that have hundreds of data centers around the globe.

Swisscom, Switzerland's telecommunications provider and ranked as one of the leading Swiss providers specializing in the integration and operation of complex IT systems, recently selected OmniStack as the technology on which to standardize its cloud infrastructure.

Gunther Thiel, head of cloud products and technology, Swisscom, comments: "SimpliVity is an important step forward to achieving a truly software defined datacenter. Specifically, its data mobility features are convincing and essential for our cloud strategy."

Swisscom Ventures acquired a minority stake in the company as they see promising technology in SimpliVity's portfolio.

The comprehensive functionality delivered in simple, building-block fashion has fueled OmniCube's rapid market adoption.

Jeremy Wheeler, innovation architect, Dairylea, one of the US's largest dairy cooperatives, commented: "After months of analyzing alternative infrastructure solutions, we discovered SimpliVity's OmniCube and were quickly convinced. We recognized that SimpliVity's innovative data architecture would offer superior functionality while allowing us to reduce costs. Within 12 days, we decided to standardize on OmniCube for all of our virtualized workloads, and purchased our first 6 systems. OmniCube allowed us to replace our SAN environments in two sites, while introducing significant improvements to backup and DR-all at a price point lower than what we would have paid simply to deploy a new traditional backup system."

Laura Dubois, VP, IDC ,commented: "SimpliVity has done something truly unique in delivering a complete IT building block that is built around an entirely new architecture for storing and managing data globally. The significant traction the company has gained in a short time period indicates that this is truly transformative technology, and I expect SimpliVity's market impact to accelerate as the company expands its operation with this new round of capital."

SimpliVity will use the C-Round capital to support the continued hypergrowth of the company. Specifically, the company plans to bolster the engineering team, allowing it to continue to deliver the features and functionality requested by existing and new customers. Additionally, it will expand its service and support organization, and its field team in order to manage the continued worldwide adoption of the technology.

"We are very happy about the addition of DFJ Growth, Meritech and Swisscom to the SimpliVity family," said Doron Kempel, CEO, SimpliVity. "We intend to use the funds in order to accelerate product development and all facets of our business, globally."

Bitcasa, Inc. has raised $11 million as supplemental to series A funding.

Horizons Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners led the round, which brings Bitcasa's funding up to a total of $20 million.

"Bitcasa has had a strong growth rate with high paid conversions that shows consumers are increasingly looking for a new way to store their digital belongings," said board member Bart Swanson. "This funding will help Bitcasa quickly scale across both the consumer and SMB markets, as well as take advantage of its growing demand overseas."

According to Gartner, family household digital content is expected to increase from 464GB to 3.3TB by 2016.

Yet, consumers don't always have control of their own data or know how to store it in a way that's affordable, private and accessible and in a way that makes it the most useful to them. This investment will address that market need and fund the development of new usability features that allow consumers and small businesses to do more with their digital belongings, all while ensuring their data is kept completely private. Additionally, it will support marketing and sales efforts both here and in international markets.

"We are very pleased to have this vote of confidence in our vision and go forward strategy," said Brian Taptich, CEO, Bitcasa. "Now that the Bitcasa Platform has reached a new level of maturity we want to accelerate adoption and enable consumers, developers and small businesses around the globe to take control of their belongings and use it in whatever way they choose."

Alpine Data Labs, Inc., in advanced analytics software for big data and Hadoop, has closed a $16 million Series B round of funding from Sierra Ventures, Mission Ventures, UMC Capital and Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC).

"Our investment approach is predicated on finding companies that are innovating around game changing technologies that impact global businesses," said Frank Lee, a VP, UMC Capital. "Predictive analytics is the single most important area of investment that can truly impact an enterprise's business performance regardless of industry, size or where in the world they do business."

Big Market, Fast Player
The advanced analytics market for Hadoop and big data is experiencing a tipping point. According to a recent IDC research report, the industry is expected to grow at 54.9% through 2017. The industry is changing under the feet of established players and is opening an opportunity for companies like Alpine Data Labs to disrupt market forces.

"Our advantage is quite simple," says Joe Otto, the company's CEO. "We are built for the new world of data, a world that's more fluid and agile, and where every data analyst can participate in data science. Our solution takes advantage of the storage and compute power of distributed systems like Hadoop or databases like Greenplum - and it does so without putting a burden on IT departments, developers or data scientists. With our software, customers are up and running in hours and their analytical teams can run complex algorithms on top of large data systems without having to move data around, or code their way through MapReduce or Pig."

Mainstream Adoption
Alpine's technology is being implemented by firms like A.T Kearney, Havas Media, Sony, Nike and Barclays.

"Our introduction to Alpine came about as we were surveying the market for a solution for our own use," said Luis Llovera, MD, RBVC. "We immediately saw the advantage of Alpine's approach to data science versus traditional methodologies. The Alpine architecture allows a company such as ours to gain more meaningful insights from our data and get to more powerful business impact."

Alpine Data Labs' growth is a testament to its technology approach and the potential for the rest of the market. The company recently released the latest version of its software at the O'Reilly Strata Conference and received rave reviews.

The firm was recently recognized in the Analyst One "Top Technologies list and VentureWire's FastTech 50 Most Innovative Technology Start-Ups.

"The market is prime for our technology and approach," explains Otto. "Companies of all sizes have made a bet on Hadoop and it's now time for them to leverage that data into the 'killer app' of big data: analytics."

When asked what he will do with his new investment beyond product development, marketing and customer support, he responds: "Change the world of big data of course. Stay tuned for more."