Storage-Over-IP Venture Raises $50 Million
Some of this interest has got to rub off on GRCI!
Systems And Storage Vendors Among Nishan's Investors
(URL: crn.com
By Joseph F. Kovar
CRN
San Jose, Calif.
7:55 PM EST Mon., Sept. 18, 2000
A group of storage and systems vendors bet on an as-yet untried concept,storage over IP,with a $50 million investment in Nishan Systems, San Jose, Calif.
Meanwhile, a number of venture funds invested $36 million in StorageWay Inc., a Fremont, Calif. based storage service provider.
Among the investors in the third round of financing in Nishan were Sun Microsystems, Dell Ventures, Siemens AG's Siemens Venture Capital and Quantum Corp's Quantum Technology Ventures, company officials say.
Nishan, founded in 1998, is developing technology aimed at building end-to-end storage networking solutions based on IP and Gigabit Ethernet, and expects to announce its first products by year-end, says Randy Fardal, vice president of marketing for the company.
Nishan, which Fardal says means "on target" or "right on the mark" in the Urdu language, received $40 million in two previous rounds of funding, making the total to date $90 million. "We're hiring like crazy, doing distribution and technology deals, and we have a long list of new projects to fund," he says.
Fardal says a number of other storage, networking and systems vendors also participated in the deal, but for various reasons did not want to disclose their participation at this time. There were more undisclosed participants than disclosed participants, he says.
One of the undisclosed participates is a Fibre Channel vendor that wants to ship a product before disclosing its investment, and another is planning to do a larger, joint announcement with Nishan later this year, he says.
In an earlier storage-over-IP deal, Cisco Systems Inc. in July acquired startup NuSpeed Internet Systems, Maple Grove, Minn. for $450 million, and made that company the core of its storage business. NuSpeed is developing technology to combine Internet routing intelligence with SANs in an effort to allow direct access to storage via the IP protocol.
Cisco's acquisition of NuSpeed was terrific news, Fardal says. "It means IP storage is getting a lot of attention," he says. "This helps get standards moving."
Meanwhile, StorageWay on Monday received $38 million in venture capital, bringing the company's total venture funding to $48 million, the company says. The company also raised $56 million in debt financing.
StorageWay plans to use the funds to develop its outsourced storage and backup services. It has deployed storage data centers in ten co-location sites in the U.S., and plans to have 35 sites worldwide by early next year.
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