German VCs Put Seven-Figure Euro Financing to Quobyte

Target Partners and High-Tech Gründerfonds Management GmbH (HTGF) have invested a seven-figure Euro amount in Quobyte Inc. in a series A financing round.

Quobyte is headquartered in Boston, MA with R&D in Berlin, Germany. It develops and markets the Quobyte Unified Storage Plane (USP), a software-defined storage system that runs on commodity Linux servers. USP enables customers to build cloud infrastructures with a quality equal to the big cloud providers such as Amazon and Google. This infusion of capital will support the start-up’s international growth and the further development of the software.

“In recent years the volume of data stored in data centers and companies has grown very rapidly, with no end in sight. At the same, IT has to cut costs and adapt to changing needs almost instantly. This means that data centers will have to be much more highly standardized and automated. Storage hardware is giving way to intelligent software, which can be completely reconfigured withins. The software-defined data center heralds a paradigm shift in the storage market,” said Waldemar Jantz, partner Target Partners.

“Quobyte USP turns commodity servers into a unique, scalable and reliable storage system – laying the foundations for the data centers of the future,” added Romy Schnelle, investment director, HTGF.

The software manages stored data across all servers and provides the complete functionality of conventional NAS or SAN appliances. Quobyte is a key technology for building a highly scalable data center purely with software.

Fault-Tolerant System
Quobyte decouples storage, users and applications from the limitations of individual hardware components. Due to fault tolerance, hardware administrators can remove, repair or replace servers, HDDs or whole racks while the system is running without users even noticing. The storage system does not need to be considered during hardware servicing.

“This means that small teams can manage a large number of servers. Data center operators can keep costs under control despite rapid growth,” explained Felix Hupfeld, co-founder, Quobyte.

As a software-defined storage system, Quobyte can make storage available via a simple interface in a matter ofs, provision performance (IO/s) or change the data placement.

“Our customers get a storage system as agile as the cloud services of Amazon or Google. With one click users can get new storage capacity or quickly move files and VM images to SSDs,” commented Björn Kolbeck, co-founder of Quobyte.

Felix Hupfeld and Björn Kolbeck founded Quobyte in 2013 after gathering seven-plus years of experience while researching the open-source storage system XtreemFS at the Zuse Institute in Berlin and working on a large scale storage system at Google.

USP is currently in closed beta and will be available in Q4 2014.

Kolbeck said about the financing: “Target Partners and HTGF have already invested in numerous B2B software companies and helped them to become successful. The Target Partners team also has a background in the software sector and speaks our language.”