Nexenta Names New CEO, Adds $24M in Funding

Nexenta Systems, which has been doing software-defined storage since before the industry heard the term, has a lot going on this week.

In addition to Nexenta's hiring a new CEO, Mark Lockareff, and its former CEO Evan Powell moving to the new position of chief strategy officer, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company revealed Feb. 27 that it has landed $24 million in Series D funding.

Privately held Nexenta's financing is being led by new investor Four Rivers Group, with participation by present company investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Razor's Edge Ventures and West Summit Capital. In addition to Four Rivers, new strategic investors Presidio Ventures and UMC Capital participated.

Nexenta, a 5-year-old fast-rising provider of open-storage software based on the Sun Microsystems-developed Zettabyte File System (ZFS), makes open systems storage that combines open-source software with industry-standard arrays and controllers. It also can connect disparate existing systems across a data center using open standards.

Nexenta's NexentaCore operating system combines the industrial-strength power of Sun's OpenSolaris with Linux and its stack of ready-to-run applications. Nexenta also offers storage-efficiency capabilities such as in-line deduplication, capacity monitoring and reporting.

Nexenta's products are disruptive because they are enterprise-class, open standards-based, and much less expensive than proprietary packages from larger companies such as EMC, NetApp and Dell.

Here are key highlights of Nexenta's last fiscal year:

--Nexenta-powered storage deployments of 1PB or greater grew by a factor of 10.
--Revenue growth doubled year-over-year; the company has experienced triple-digit growth for three consecutive years.
--Adoption of NexentaStor exceeded the 5,000-customer-deployment milestone, while follow-on sales to existing customers expanded by 475 percent.
--Total storage under management now exceeds 660PB, and Nexenta has enabled an estimated $400 million in hardware storage sales for its reseller partners.
--The company's global reach continues to expand with active partners growing by 75 percent since January 2012.
--Nexenta has established official subsidiaries and teams in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea and Japan.
--Nexenta expanded its product portfolio with the launch of NexentaVSA for View for managing and deploying virtualized environments.