Avere Raises $20M for Hybrid Cloud Storage R&D

PITTSBURGH, Pa. -- Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, announced that it has raised an additional $20 million in venture financing, bringing the total amount invested in the company to $72 million. The Series-D funding round was led by Western Digital Capital, with participation from previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing and continued development of the company's hybrid cloud storage solutions.

Avere's novel approach bucks the costly trend of ramping up physical storage capacity and performance through purchasing bigger storage servers loaded with an exorbitant amount of disks or flash, and then connecting them to higher-bandwidth pipes. Instead, Avere has invented a flexible, software-defined storage tiering methodology that fosters intelligent use of multiple storage technologies (RAM, SSD, SAS and SATA) that can negate the weaknesses of one type of media or accelerate underutilized strengths in another. The company offers a lineup of products that are optimized according to workload requirements ranging from small enterprise to the most intense storage scenarios in the world.

"The reality for 99% of enterprises is they will operate increasingly in a hybrid IT storage environment for many years to come. This means that no single storage technology will win, and both on-premises and cloud storage will be required to achieve cost and performance goals," said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. "With this Series-D funding round, we continue to scale the company so that we can provide the best solutions to customers embarking on their hybrid cloud path."

Avere