Kaminario Collects $15M Boost For High-Performance Storage

As virtualization and other changes put more demands on the data center, Kaminario Inc., a maker of high-performance storage systems, is expected to announce Monday that it has secured a $15 million Series C round.

Globespan Capital Partners led the round, with participation from previous investors Sequoia Capital and Pitango Venture Capital.

The Newton, Mass.-based company, which was founded in Israel, has raised $34 million in total funding.

Rather than competing directly with incumbents like EMC Corp., Dell Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. for every sale, Kaminario is targeting applications that are most in need of a performance boost.

"Storage buyers tend to be extremely conservative in who they'll trust with their data, but by targeting a pain point that's so acute, the company will be able to get past that," said Venky Ganesan, a managing director with Globespan.

Kaminario's storage system boosts the performance of storage by putting all the data on DRAM, the same memory that powers most computers. The company has also designed an architecture that distributes data across machines so that no one machine will be either idle or overloaded.

Underneath it all is a layer of hard drives that are used to back up the information. The company also plans to offer a flash-based system but hasn't announced a date for its release.

"Though loading storage systems with DRAM and flash alone can boost performance, they can't increase the number of input/output operations per second that a storage system can manage, and that's where the bottleneck is in storage performance today," Ganesan said. "Those technologies alone are like adding more lanes to a freeway when it's the onramps that are backed up", he said.

"Kaminario expects to sell to companies of all sizes, since almost every company has at least one application that needs a jump in its storage performance," said Dani Golan, its co-founder and chief executive.

Since launching its products last year, the company has landed customers, such as Leumi Group, that are running its system in production. That success had investors coming to it for the current round and resulted in a "very respectable valuation," Golan said, though he wouldn't be more specific.

Ganesan will take a seat on its board as a result of the round.