Cloud Computing: Stealthy Convergent.io gets $10M for software defined storage

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Looks like the crusade for agility and programability os moving from computing and networking into the realm of storage, as startup Convergent.io gets $10 million in Series A funding. This follows yesterday’s $33M round for Nutanix, which makes similar software defined storage claims.

Convergent.io has raised a $10 million Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup, which was founded in October last year, has a team of storage and virtualization experts, and plans to build a product that will help customers better use their existing storage resources in virtualized environments…

Ramana Jonnala, co-founder and CEO of Convergent.io epxlains that virtualization has led to companies using a lot more storage, experiencing latency and also confusion about what information is stored where. The aim of Convergent.io is to build a product (is it a system? software? Jonnala won’t say) that virtualizes and then adds intelligence to storage networks and ensures that the right storage is used for the job. This could mean sending archives to slower hard drives but real-time transactions to faster SSDs, all based on policies the customer sets.

But none of this is real yet, and frankly, software defined anything is the marketing phrase du jour. Storage is just now getting in on the hype. Just yesterday I reported on Nutanix, which raised a $33 million third round for its software-defined storage appliance.

That’s not to say that storage in virtualized or webscale environments doesn’t need a little innovation, but just that in Convergent.io’s case Jonnala isn’t saying what that innovation is until next summer when he expects to release the first product. The funding will help him hire the right people to meet that deadline. Convergent.io currently has 16 employees and expects to hire more engineers thanks to this round.

Jonnala is a veteran of XenSource and Veritas and is working with Co-founders Andrew Warfield and Keir Fraser who also worked at XenSource.