Converged Server, Storage Developer Nutanix Closes $25 Million Funding Round

That Series B funding round, led by venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, brings total funding in the company to $38.6 million, said Tiffany To, director of product marketing for the San Jose, Calif.-based storage vendor.

Nutanix, which in August came out of stealth mode, currently has 20 solution provider partners in North America. The company, which has a channel-only sales model, offers partners margins of between 35 percent and 45 percent, To said.

The new round of funding will be used to scale out Nutanix's sales and marketing capabilities and personnel, To said.

"Right now, we only have 50 people, mostly in R&D," she said. "So we plan to scale the sales team and do more channel enablement through our marketing team."

Nutanix is the developer of the Nutanix Complete Cluster, a hardware and software solution that converges compute and storage into a single building block for scaling out virtualized data centers.

The Nutanix Complete Cluster is based on a 2U rack mount chassis which can be configured with up to four nodes, totaling 20 TBs of SATA hard drives, 1.3 TBs of high-performance Fusion-io solid state storage, and 48 cores of Intel Xeon 6400 processors, To said.

The devices are pre-configured with VMware ESXi hypervisors, which means they can be pulled from the carton, plugged in, and ready to go in 30 minutes, she said. "You don't need a specialized storage guy to do it," she said.

A single chassis with four nodes provides up to 25,000 IOs per second of performance, To said. The Nutanix Complete Cluster is scalable for both performance and capacity, so the addition of each further fully-configured chassis adds an additional 25,000 IOs per second of performance, she said.

The company is focused on midmarket customers where other fully-configured, converged infrastructure products such as VCE's Vblock and NetApp's FlexPod are too expensive, To said.

"We're delivering a new building block for the virtualized data center," she said. "We're trying to get customers to get rid of their networked storage systems, which are expensive and complex."

The Nutanix Complete Cluster is available through the company’s channel partners, with list pricing starting at $75,000.

In addition to the new funding, Nutanix also said it has appointed two new members to its board of directors, including Shirish Sathaye, general partner of Khosla Ventures, and Mark Leslie, former chairman and CEO of Veritas Software. Leslie had been serving as an advisor to Nutanix.