Home Blog Page 435

Actifio retains unicorn status in latest funding round

Four years after picking up a $100m E-round, Actifio has picked up another $100m, valuing the company at more than $1.3bn. Total investment stands at $311.5m, according to our records.

The  F-round was led by Crestline Investors and joined by North Bridge Venture Partners, 83North, Advanced Technology Ventures, Heritage Group, Andreessen Horowitz, and other existing investors.

In the 2014  funding Actifo was valued at $1.1bn – gaining it unicorn status as a startup valued at more than $1bn.  At the time  of the funding Techcrunch reported the copy data manager and converger vendor was preparing for an IPO and expected $100m annual revenue run rate for that year.

The IPO never got off the ground and in four years  the valuation has increased by just 18.2 per cent – admittedly that works out at an extra $200m.  But the company has an updated story to tell. It claims a total addressable market (TAM)  of $50bn – 13.6 per cent larger than the $44bn TAM calculated in 2014 – and more than 3,000 enterprise customers, compared with 300 in 2014. They include five of  the top 20 global financials, four of the top 10 energy companies, three of the top 10 healthcare providers, six of the top 10 service providers and four of the top 20 global retail organisations.

Actifio now refers to itself as a multi-cloud, data-as-a-service company. Competitors include Cohesity, Delphix and others in the data management space.  Let’s see how it uses this $100m cash injection,  which is needed to develop and grow its customer base, accelerate away from  competitors, and get revenues and revenue growth rate high enough to take another shot at an IPO. 

Nakivo extends backup product support

NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.5 supports vSphere 6.7 and adds integration with storage vendors such as Dell EMC Data Domain, adding Boost support, and Netgear ReadyNAS.

It has bandwidth throttling to enable speed limits to be set for data protection processes to avoid network overload during business hours or chosen periods of time.

The software adds functionality for VM data recovery across platforms. Users can export VM data from VMware and Hyper-V backups into VMDK, VHD, or VHDX format. The exported files can then be used for recovery across different hypervisors, cross-platform VM data migration, long-term archival, or sandbox testing.

Nakivo says its software can be installed directly on Netgear’s ReadyNAS devices, creating a VM backup appliance. It is then a 5-in-1 offering featuring backup hardware, software, storage, built-in global data deduplication, and backup-to-cloud functionality.

A fully-functional free trial of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.5 can be downloaded at  www.nakivo.com.

Nakivo is a US business founded in 2012 which claims 20 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth and  more than 10,000 deployments worldwide. Customers include Honda, Coca Cola, China Airlines, Microsemi, and others.

NGD adds Newport computational storage drives

NGD

NGD has announced a Newport platform for computational storage, built on the Catalina-2 product base.

The 16 flash channel ASIC-based product runs 64-bit Linux in a variety of form factors including U.2, M.2 and EDSFF (ruler) with NVMe SSDs and an NVMe 1.3 PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 link to hosts. 

The software supports container virtualization and all Catalina-2 applications are supported.

NGD claims Newport allows computational storage to “cross the chasm” and enter mainstream market use cases. 

NGD CEO Nader Salessi claims: “The Newport platform further enables near-data processing for real-time analytics on large-scale data sets with improved power and density, both in watts per terabyte and terabytes per cubic inch.”

We have no information about capacity levels, pricing, on-board CPU power and customers.

The Newport platform and computational storage products will be showcased at the Flash Memory Summit, Aug 7-9, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. ®

NetApp ONTAP AI vs Pure AIRI

We have charted the numbers in the NetApp ONTAP AI story to show how NetApp’s A800-based AI box using Nvidia’s DGX-1 GPUs compared to its A700 version and the Pure AIRI system:

As you can see the A800 AI-in-a-box out-performed and out-scaled both the NetApp A700 system and Pure’s AIRI offering.

Tesla hires Seagate CFO

The surprise resignation of  Seagate CFO Dave Morton was due to a move to Tesla,  the electric car company has revealed.

Seagate has been Morton’s career home for 23 years. He will become the chief accounting officer at Tesla, reporting to CFO Deepak Ahuja.

It’s an interesting move, and one thing is certain: Tesla will be a more exciting employer than Seagate.

Tesla’s previous CAO, Eric Branderiz, left Tesla on 7 March. SVP Engineering Doug Field resigned from Tesla this month and Musk announced a 9 per cent Tesla employee layoff in June.

Tesla’s SEC filing said Morton, age 46, will have an annual base salary of $350,000 and will receive a $10m new hire equity grant (stock options effectively), which will vest over four years.

No doubt the company car scheme at Tesla  is also good.

Morton will be responsible for Tesla’s corporate financial reporting and global accounting, payroll, tax, and trade activities.

He resigned from Seagate on 25 July and is officially leaving on 3 August, seven working days later.