Nasuni Gets $15 Million Series B Christmas Present

Fast-rising cloud gateway provider Nasuni said Dec. 20 that it has snagged a sweet Christmas present: an investment of $15 million in Series B funding.

Flybridge Capital Partners led the round with participation from existing investors, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners, who led the company’s Series A funding in March 2009. Investment in Nasuni now totals $23 million for the two rounds.

Nasuni makes Nasuni Filer, a virtual NAS file server/front end that runs on VMware and uses publicly available cloud resources–namely, Amazon S3, Iron Mountain Digital, Nirvanex and Rackspace–to handle primary data cloud storage.

Thus, Nasuni doesn’t have to compete with all those big names; instead, it feeds business right to them.

“The cloud, with its great efficiencies of scale, is the future for all file storage,” CEO and co-founder Andres Rodriguez, a former IT director of the New York Times, told eWEEK a while back.

Natick, Mass.-based Nasuni spent the last year building a loyal customer base, and that proved invaluable during the fund raising, Rodriguez said.

“We are now working with partners to leverage our sales capability. The time for utility storage has arrived, and Nasuni is rushing to help companies make the transition,” Rodriguez said.

And that 15 mil will go a long way toward making that all happen.

Nasuni (the name comes from a combination of NAS and “uni,” for unity) has designed its gateway to look and feel like a conventional file system. It features full Windows CIFS, AC, and Active Directory support.

Nasuni also offers optional snapshots, instant data recovery (in case of mistaken deleted files) and end-to-end encryption.

Nasuni’s synchronous snapshots capture the entire file system hourly and saves the snapshots to the cloud, where they remain accessible. Snapshots are deduplicated to minimize capacity usage, he said.

Nasuni also has a rollback feature that enables users to go back to any point in the life of a file, directory or file system with only a few clicks.

Pricing is straightforward and is handled on per-server (versus number of seats) basis: $200 per month per server on a two-year contract, $250 per month per server on a 1-year contract or a straight $300 per month per server for a month-to-month arrangement. Any number of seats can use the gateway, Rodriguez said.

Of course, storage capacity in Amazon, Iron Mountain or any of the others is a separate bill.

Things are indeed looking up for this company.