Gluster, a US-based open source storage solutions provider, has received $8.5 million in a Series B funding round led by Index Ventures and joined by Nexus Venture Partners, an existing investor.
Gluster is an open storage platform provider founded in 2005 by Hitesh Chellani and Anand Babu Periasamy. In late 2008, Gluster raised $4 million in Series-A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, which has $320 million under management.
Gluster targets sectors such as healthcare, legal, media, digital media delivery, healthcare, energy and biotechnology where the growth of unstructured data requires unique storage economics that can scale. Gluster's storage platform enables enterprises to manage petabytes of file data in a single volume across multiple storage servers. The firm claims its platform meets the capacity and performance needs at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems since it runs on commodity hardware and scales storage in a modular way.
“Storage is emerging as the Achilles heel for virtualising the data center and the move to the cloud. Gluster provides a hardware-agnostic, scalable storage solution that eliminates this road block and helps companies take advantage of the cloud’s true benefits,” said Naren Gupta, co-founder, Nexus Venture Partners.
The company will use the funds to expand its sales, marketing and support teams and allocate additional resources to partner development. Gluster is headquartered in Milpitas, California and has an office in Bengalooru. In May 2010, the company roped in Ben Golub, ex-CEO of online address book Plaxo.com.
"There is a clear demand for a disruptive approach to storage that matches the trend towards lower cost solutions and greater manageability. Community deployments and revenues growing at a very fast pace and the company is racking up an impressive list of partners, product awards and reference customers," said Bernard Dalle, partner at Index Ventures and a member of Gluster's board of directors.
Nexus previously invested in open source web conferencing provider DimDim and cloud startup Cloud.com with Index Ventures. Index Ventures' current portfolio includes cloud computing firm RightScale, Mimecast, DimDim, Cloud.com and Optier.