Nasuni buys DBM Cloud Systems

Nasuni has bought replicator DBM Cloud Systems to move on-premises file data to Nasuni’s cloud.

Dixon Doll Jr, Nasuni
Dixon Doll Jr

Nasuni is a a cloud-based file services platform provider supporting AWS, Azure, and GCP. It stores the bulk of its data in object storage. It started out in 2008 as a file sync’n’share, collaboration, and file services gateway supplier.

Nasuni raised a $60 million growth investment in March and $229 million in total across nine rounds. DBM Cloud Services was co-founded in December 2015 by CEO Dixon Doll Jr who was involved with flash storage startups FusionIO and then Violin Memory. Its AIRE (Advanced Intelligent Replication Engine) cloud-native software technology moves file data to/from on-premises and AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, and Oracle.

Paul Flanagan, Nasuni CEO, said: “The Nasuni File Data Platform includes the world’s only cloud-native global file system that combines file and object storage delivering unlimited scale and capacity and we’ve built strong partnerships with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for the backend object storage.

“We are making file data migration, tiering and data movement between clouds a frictionless service. Today, enterprises do not want to lock in all their data with a single cloud, but are instead adopting a multi-cloud approach. DBM’s technology and the expertise we’ve gained will enable Nasuni to accelerate and innovate our support for data migration, multi-cloud and data mobility.”

Nasuni says it can also move and maintain data in proximity to desired cloud services and applications for best performance and minimized security risk.

Dr Joseph Slember, formerly DBM’s SVP of engineering, has joined Nasuni as VP engineering and will lead a data mobility team. Slember said: “By combining the [DBM] technology with Nasuni’s file data services platform, users will gain faster file data migrations and more intelligent tiering, saving significant time and costs.”

The cost of the acquisition has not been revealed.

DBM background

DBM was started up by “D” (ex-Violin COO Dixon Doll) “B” (Violin co-founder Jon Bennet), and “M” (ex-Violin exec Jon Murphy). Doll was CEO, Bennet the CTO, and Murphy the SVP for sales and marketing.

It raised a  $1 million seed round in November 2016 from angel investor Mike Hennessey and Longstreet Ventures, which was actually founded by Dixon Doll Jr. There was a $3.5 million convertible note funding led by Shoreline Management Ventures in July 2018, taking its total raised to $4.5 million – a relatively low amount in the storage startup world.

AIRE runs outside the data path and is policy and metadata-driven to provide selective replication.

DBM is a Pure Storage Technology Alliance Partner and its AIRE product can replicate and migrate data at petabyte levels to Pure’s FlashBlade from object stores in AWS, Azure, GCP, and the Oracle Cloud.