SimpliVity Scores $25M Funding To Expand OmniCube Converged Infrastructure

Startup converged infrastructure-in-a-box developer SimpliVity on Monday said it has closed a Series B round of funding worth $25 million.

SimpliVity, which last month introduced its OmniCube data center solution as it came out of stealth mode, also used the opportunity to differentiate its offering from the wide range of converged infrastructure solutions currently in the market.

With the new round, which included previous investors but which was led by new investor Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, total funding in SimpliVity now stands at $43 million, said Doron Kempel, CEO of the Westborough, Mass.-based company.

[Related: Startup SimpliVity Tackles Converged Infrastructure With Integrated Server, Storage, Networking ]

"It's a large round, the size we wanted from the company we wanted," Kempel said.

The new investment will be used to fuel growth in 2013, including expanding sales of the SimpliVity OmniCube to new geographies as well as building out its sales and support capabilities, Kempel said.

The SimpliVity OmniCube is a 2U rack mount system that includes 10 Intel processor cores combined with eight 3-TB hard drives and four 200-GB SSDs, along with the necessary networking resources, as well as a hardware accelerator for high-performance operation.

The heart of the OmniCube is software developed by SimpliVity that provides deduplication of primary, backup, archiving and WAN-optimized storage. The software also provides a cloud gateway that allows it to tie to virtual server instances in the Amazon cloud.

It features a hardware acceleration card for deduping and compressing data from its inception, and comes with built-in WAN optimization, backup software and SSD cache, which means customers do not have to purchases these capabilities separately, Kempel said.

The SimpliVity OmniCube is currently in beta testing, and it is expected to be available in production units by mid-November.

For Kempel, the new round of funding provides an opportunity to grab mindshare in the nascent converged infrastructure market.

Converged infrastructure refers to tying server, storage and IP networking into an integrated solution in order to give customers a single vendor source for building data centers and moving towards cloud computing.

Converged infrastructure is a new category of products, Kempel said. "And it's so sexy that everybody says they're converged," he said. "So it's up to the leaders to define the taxonomy."

NEXT: Defining Converged Infrastructure The SimpliVity Way

However, SimpliVity’s Kempel said, most converged infrastructure solutions such as Hewlett-Packard's Matrix, Dell's vStart, IBM's PureSystems, VCE, and NetApp's FlexPod are made of separate products put together in a single rack rather than built from the ground up as a single integrated solution.

Other solutions may be built from the start for higher efficiency but may lack certain features such as caching or multi-tenancy, or may be VMware-centric, he said.

"SimpliVity offers high efficiency and complete functionality," he said. "The only thing we're missing is multi-tenancy, and that will come soon."

Kempel said the SimpliVity OmniCube is one of the first solutions to be developed as part of a software-defined data center, which he said combines commodity hardware with full-function software to deliver cloud computing capabilities.

Because the SimpliVity software runs on commodity hardware, customers could in theory run that software on their own hardware, Kempel said. "But the market does not to run our software on their hardware," he said. "They want our complete solution. We package it in our own box because we don't feel the market wants just the software."

PUBLISHED SEPT. 24, 2012