Online Storage Newcomer Ocarina Gets $20M Funding

PARIS—Online storage newcomer Ocarina Networks said Feb. 25 that it has closed a $20 million round of financing.

The Series B round was led by JAFCO Ventures, with major participation from Series A investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners. Kleiner Perkins has been an early backer of such IT success stories as Amazon.com, Google, LSI Logic, Quantum, Sun Microsystems and Tandem.

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The company claims to provide the industry's first patented content-aware compression and object deduplication technologies to reduce the space taken by online file data—thus lowering costs for power and cooling in the data center. 

A number of companies—namely EMC Avamar, NetApp, Quantum, FalconStor, Pillar Data Systems, Data Domain and others—would dispute that claim, however, since they've all been using top-flight data deduplication features for three years or more.

CEO Murli Thirumale will not be disputed, however, when he said that "online storage optimization is one of the most important developments in the storage industry, and is fast becoming a 'must have' for anyone with growing storage needs and a desire to contain costs."

Ocarina said its software seamlessly snaps into existing storage systems to enable users to store the same amount of data on significantly fewer disks.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company said its Ocarina Optimizers have shrunk over a billion files in beta testing with early users.

Ocarina's three-step software line—called Extract, Correlate and Optimize—can deduplicate file types that include e-mail, photos, video, Microsoft Office and industry-specific file types for energy, media, medicine and genomics.