Startup SimpliVity has raised $ 25 million to staff up engineering, support and marketing efforts as it prepares to ship its OmniCube ”super appliance” in the fourth quarter.
SimpliVity CEO Doron Kempel.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the Series B round which also includes contributions from existing backers Accel Partners and Charles River Ventures. The new cash brings total funding to $ 43 million for the company which was founded in 2009 but emerged from stealth mode in August.
With Omnicube, SimpliVity claims it can cram up to 10 separate functions including WAN optimization, deduplication and backup into a single 2U box that runs the company’s software and uses a hardware accelerator to speed up data writes. OmniCube should be available in the fourth quarter, perhaps by late November, SimpliVity CEO Doron Kempel told me in an interview.
SimpliVity’s pitch is that if one appliance that combines two or three workloads is good, one that melds 8 or 10 workloads is better. For mid-market companies without a ton of in-house IT personnel, the tasks of managing servers, storage switches, primary storage, back-up and deduplication appliances can be too much. OmniCube puts all that together into one box that can be managed by the VM administrator.
The Westborough, MA-based vendor plans to sell all of its appliances through VARs and integrators, Kempel said, adding that Rick Shea, SimpliVity’s VP of sales and support, once directed EqualLogic’s successful channel-friendly sales model.
There are lots of data center appliances available — from HP, IBM and Cisco — all primarily legacy hardware vendors targeting enterprise accounts. SimpiVity’s focus on the mid market and the fact that it’s a startup that doesn’t have to worry about cannibalizing sales of older products, differentiates it. That and the fact that it has deep funding and good technology DNA –its execs come from Dell, EqualLogic, EMC, and IBM — mean it’s got a pretty good foundation on which to build.
Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Tracy O
