Gluster Completes $8.5 Million Series B Round

Gluster, Inc. has closed an $8.5 million Series B round of funding led by Index Ventures with participation from the previous investor, Nexus Venture Partners.  

Gluster has been experiencing growth worldwide in sales, partnerships, and community adoption, driven by the move to cloud based architectures, the explosion in unstructured data, and the increasing virtualization of the data center. With this new investment round, Gluster will expand its sales, marketing and support teams and allocate additional resources to partner development.

Bernard Dalle, partner at Index Ventures and member of the Gluster board of directors said: "There is a clear demand for a disruptive approach to storage that matches the trend towards lower cost solutions and greater manageability. The team at Gluster has proven their ability to meet this demand as evidenced by community deployments and revenues growing at a very fast pace. The company is racking up an impressive list of partners, product awards and reference customers."

Multiple trends are driving Gluster’s growth across a range of industry segments including healthcare, legal, media and hosting providers:

• Unstructured data is growing by 60 percent per year, creating a need for vastly different storage economics;
• over 20 percent of all compute workloads are now virtualized, creating a need for vastly different shared storage architectures; and,
• the cloud is expected to account for 14 percent of all IT spending by 2014, creating a need for storage that works both on-premise and in the cloud.

Gluster addresses these needs with a scale-out, open source, software-only storage solution that enables enterprises to manage petabytes of file data in a single volume across multiple storage servers. Gluster can be deployed using both commodity hardware and public cloud storage, delivering performance across a wide range of workloads, including those found in virtualized compute environments. As a result, Gluster gives enterprises the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized, scale-on-demand pool in much the same way that they treat computing resources today, improving storage economics in the process.

"As the explosion in unstructured data continues, Gluster has demonstrated a unique capability to address challenges associated with managing massive amounts of data," said Naren Gupta, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners and member of the Gluster board of directors. "Storage is emerging as the Achilles heel for virtualizing the data center and the move to the cloud.  Gluster provides a hardware-agnostic, easily scalable storage solution that eliminates this road block and helps companies take advantage of the cloud?s true benefits. We are very excited to partner with the Gluster team to help create the next standard in scale-out storage."

"We are gratified by the level of interest Gluster has received from investors, customers, and the community, and we are thrilled by the opportunity that this funding round gives us to accelerate growth," said Ben Golub, president and CEO at Gluster. "We welcome the global reach and open-source expertise that Bernard and Index bring to the table, and are grateful to all of our investors for their confidence in our technology, team and the market?s tremendous growth potential."