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Mountain View Data Inc., which develops server management and network storage software, on Wednesday will announce that it has secured a new round of funding to be used for research and development as well as marketing.
The Hitachi Corporate Venture Capital Fund; Nippon Venture Capital Co.; ADTX, a storage hardware vendor; Nissei Capital; Daiwa Bank; and Kokusai Capital have all invested in the company.
There will be a second closing for the funding in early May. While financial details were not disclosed, the total funding is expected to be between $5 million and $10 million, a source close to the deal told eWEEK.
Cliff Miller, Mountain View Datas president and CEO who is currently in Japan, told eWEEK in an interview that he expects the Hitachi investment to speed the adoption of Mountain View Datas PowerCockpit server management technology and network storage software on Hitachi hardware.
“Hitachi is a leader in storage and is also strong in certain verticals like bioengineering and medical engineering, where we see juicy business opportunities for high-end PC server clustering solutions,” he said.
In a prepared statement Dr. Asai, president of the Hitachi CVC Fund, said its investment “reflects our desire to work closely together in the storage and server markets. We feel the PowerCockpit clustering software and network storage software running on Hitachi hardware is a winning combination.”
Mountain View Data announced in late February that it had bought Turbolinuxs PowerCockpit for an undisclosed amount. The company last week released PowerCockpit 2.0.
The PowerCockpit software is used for deployment, provisioning and management in grid computing environments, as well as in corporate data centers and Internet data centers for managing servers and blade servers.
Miller said Mountain View Data will use the new funds to integrate its MVD Sync network storage software into the PowerCockpit framework. “We have been developing MVD Sync for about two years, and released Version 2.0 last November.
“We will create a PowerCockpit Sync Module, using the PowerCockpit Software Development Kit, so that the users will be able to easily synchronize data on their cluster nodes. We expect this to take between three and five months,” he said.
Existing PowerCockpit customers are interested in using MVD Sync to provide data synchronization among the nodes of the cluster. Data synchronization on clusters is currently a “rather complicated and time-consuming task, with people having to cobble together handcrafted scripts,” he said.
The company currently has some 15 customers running PowerCockpit, while another 50 are evaluating the product.
On the marketing side, Miller said his company will use some of the new funds to open up the Chinese market, which is still “in the early stages of adopting deployment and clustering technology. This means we have a great opportunity to become a market leader there,” he said.
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