New Start-Up to Follow: NexGen Storage

NexGen Storage, Inc., in SAN storage for virtual server environments, has secured Series A financing led by Grotech Ventures with participation from Access Venture Partners. The financing round will be used to accelerate product availability and recruit additional talent. NexGen Storage’s innovative storage area network (SAN) solutions deliver deterministic performance and Quality of Service (QoS) for virtual server environments.

"NexGen Storage has designed a revolutionary new storage system architected from the ground up to leverage the full power of solid state storage technologies," said John Spiers, NexGen Storage co-founder and chief executive officer. "This new architecture enables 10 to 20 times the performance of traditional high performance SAN systems, and will set the standard for next generation storage – from small data centers to the cloud."

NexGen Storage SAN solutions will be commercially available later this year.

"We believe the storage industry is on the cusp of a major transformation as shared storage architectures move from being designed around rotating disks to being architected for solid state storage technology," said Lawson DeVries, principal, Grotech Ventures. "NexGen Storage is well positioned to capitalize on this transformation and to lead the market in delivering consistent, high performance storage and application QoS within virtual server environments."

"Storage requirements of today’s virtual server environments exceed what traditional storage solutions provide § from performance to capacity efficiency, to power consumption and space utilization," said Kirk J. Holland, venture partner, Access Venture Partners. "NexGen has the right team and the right technology at the right time to capitalize on this significant market opportunity, and to deliver the full power of solid state storage. We’ve known John Spiers and Kelly Long for almost a decade now through their success at LeftHand Networks, and we are pleased to partner with them in this next technology venture."

NexGen Storage was founded in early 2010 by John Spiers and Kelly Long, NexGen Storage chief technology officer. Spiers is a 25-year storage industry veteran, and was a LeftHand Networks co-founder CEO/CTO. Long is a 20-year industry expert in architecting storage software and hardware solutions, and was a LeftHand Networks co-founder and chief software architect.

NexGen Storage is headquartered in Louisville, Colorado and is currently hiring qualified staff.

Comments

That's a common way for start-ups. People sell their company to another one and then left, found new or similar ideas and start their own venture to try to reiterate the same success.

LeftHand Networks, in iSCSI systems, was acquired by HP in 2008 for $360 million in cash after getting $86 million in financial funding. In 2010 their two co-founders John Spiers and Kelly Long, respectively CEO and CTO, have launched Louisville, CO-based NexGen Storage where they have the same positions. Storage veteran Long was also previously at Sun, SQL (purchased by Sun in 2008), Crosswalk, Chaparral (acquired by Dot Hill), Dot Hill, Maxtor and StorageTek (sold to Sun).

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The start-up secures $1.3 million or $2 million in Series A funding depending on the sources, SEC Watch and Boulder County Business Report.

It is in stealth mode and you can only read on its web site: "NexGen Storage delivers the industry’s first SAN solutions with configurable, deterministic performance and Quality of Service (QoS) for virtual server environments. Ideal for organizations deploying virtualization and cloud infrastructures, NexGen SANs meet today’s most demanding storage requirements by providing superior performance, capacity efficiency, power consumption and space utilization."

Apparently, NexGen is designing a new architecture of storage subsystems, supposed to be available this year and based on SSDs for virtualization environment, aimed at medium and large companies. That's the kind of products that is exactly what a lot of users are currently asking for, even if the company has already competitors in this field.

Both investors into NexGen, Grotech Ventures and Access Venture Partners, have also put money into Rebit, in CDP software.

There was also a company called Nexgen Storage Technology in Milpitas, CA, incorporated on March 1999, without any relation with the new start-up, but that apparently disappeared as its president Vahid Ghassemian joins Southwall Technologies Inc. three months later.