Startup storage vendor Maginatics is getting some more high-level support, this time from the likes of Intel Capital.
Maginatics, which is looking to offer a software-only storage solution that will address the growing movement toward cloud computing and increasingly distributed environments, announced Aug. 20 that Intel Capital—the investment arm of the giant chip maker—is among the investors that helped raise $17 million in Series B funding.
Other new investors include WestSummit Capital and Comcast Ventures, which joined with existing investors, including virtualization technology vendor VMware and Atlantic Bridge. Maginatics executives said they will use the money to grow its sales and marketing teams in hopes of driving growth in both the United States and overseas.
The company’s flagship product, the Maginatics File System (MagFS), is a software offering that officials said brings the promise of network-attached storage (NAS) to today’s more highly distributed environments. MagFS comes at a time when businesses not only are working to find better ways to store the increasingly massive amounts of data that are being created daily, but also to enable easier access at a time when employees are using a growing range of devices—from traditional PCs to smartphones—to get to the information.
In addition, these workers are increasingly mobile, which means they want to be able to access the data from wherever they are, and on whatever device they’re using.
The company, founded in 2010, is looking to address these geographically distributed environments by leveraging such technologies as WAN optimization, mobile connectivity and fine-grained locking, according to officials.
“Since coming out of stealth last year, we have seen a sharp ramp-up in customers who love the ease-of-use and cloud accessibility delivered by MagFS,” Maginatics co-founder and CEO Amarjit Gill said in a statement. “This funding round by top venture capitalists is further validation of our vision to revolutionize enterprise storage by replacing traditional, monolithic infrastructure with a lightweight, highly elastic and feature-rich distributed file system that exposes the full potential of the cloud within the enterprise.”
This idea of distributed computing can refer to something other than just geography, according to company officials. In highly parallel computing environments, multiple compute nodes need to gain access to shared storage pools. The company’s MagFS can help reduce bottlenecks that can occur when those nodes try to access the shared pools.