SaaS-based storage orchestrator Volumez has raised $20 million.
This A-round of funding was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with participation from existing investors Viola Ventures and Pitango. Viola and Pitango’s initial seed-type funding has not been revealed.
Volumez provides a web-based interface through which a customer can provision NVMe block access storage for Linux-based and Kubernetes-organized applications. They can specify their capacity, performance, resilience and security needs by declarative statements and the Volumez software composes or orchestrates the storage they need, be it on-premises (NVMe JBOF) or in the AWS public cloud. Azure and GCP support is coming, we’re told.
CEO Amir Faintuch’s announcement mentioned Israeli unrest, stating: “I am excited by the expression of confidence of the new investor [Koch] who represents the American economy and has chosen to invest in the company at a difficult time of challenging macroeconomic conditions and internal challenges in Israel. This is a certificate of honor for the company and the uniqueness of its solution and innovation.”
Koch Disruptive Technologies founder and CEO Chase Koch responded: “Volumez technology is set to revolutionize the data infrastructure market, allowing, for the first time, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments at scale with significantly improved performance and latency compared to state-of-the-art on-premises solutions with cloud extensions.”
Volumez, founded in 2020, has a headcount of 36, with most in its Tel Aviv R&D facility and the others in Boston. The new funds will pay for business expansion in the sales, marketing and engineering areas, with growth in the US operation.
Comment
To an extent Volumez’s software deskills storage admins or removes the need to employ them. It provides storage admin provisioning and deployment skills and will support file-based workloads plus extension to the Azure and GCP clouds. Whether Volumez software can orchestrate on-premises NVMe flash storage that actually has “significantly improved performance and latency compared to state-of-the-art on-premises solutions” remains to be proved.
For example, if a Volumez user specifies 200TB of capacity, with 1 million IOPS and 500μs latency, how will they know if that is faster than the same storage facility obtained from a Pure Storage FlashArray or HPE Alletra MP block array consumed through GreenLake? Surely – for some customers – it is not the actual performance numbers that matter here but how much the underlying storage systems cost, including the admin cost, and whether you need the on-premises and public cloud cross capability.
Volumez has to show that its tech is significantly easier to use than competing suppliers, and needs less expensive storage hardware on-premises or instances in the cloud. For example, use cheap NVMe JBOFs instead of FlashArrays. Like Nebulon, it is differentiated by its cloud-based control plane but has a need to educate its users about its unfamiliar tech.
