Nutanix has closed a $ 25 million Series B round for its converged infrastructure system that puts computing and storage on the same node, allowing companies to scale their storage layer without investing in a SAN. Khosla Ventures led the round, along with existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital.
The goal of the Nutanix product, called Complete Cluster, is to scale computing and storage simultaneously, thus allowing for the benefits of parallel computing at both layers. For computing, that might mean intelligent load balancing or running a single job across multiple machines. For storage it means faster performance because the data is housed closer to the computing than if it were in a standard SAN or NAS setup.
Nutanix released the first iteration of Complete Cluster in August: This is a 2U cluster consisting of 8 6-core Intel processors, up to 768GB RAM, 1TB of Fusion-io solid-state storage, and a combined 35TB of hard drive capacity. The systems, which also feature Nutanix’s purpose-built software, start at $ 75,000.
The Nutanix management team has deep roots with massively parallel database provider Aster Data Systems (now part of Teradata) and Oracle, and CTO Mohit Aron led the development of the Google File System. The company launched in April 2011 and has now raised a total of $ 28.2 million in two funding rounds.
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