Gridstore Raises $12.5 Million In Series A Financing For Grid-Based Scale-Out Storage

Gridstore has raised $12.5 million in Series A funding for its scale-out storage offering. The round was led by GGV Capital and Onset Ventures along with participation from existing investors. The investment brings the company’s total venture funding to $15 million.

Gridstore offers a software-based storage system that provides a simple “building block,” method for scaling out storage. Gridstore makes the claim that it brings the era of mainframe style monolithic storage and its disruptive forklift upgrades to an end. It does this by virtualizing storage over a distributed grid environment.

As blocks are added, the size of the virtual storage pool increases.  An unlimited number of virtual controllers means that the storage pools can be allocated appropriately. The controller essentially gets distributed, allowing for more bandwidth as additional storage blocks are added.

Gridstore poses another threat to the legacy storage providers such as EMC, IBM and NetApp. Those providers’ monolithic systems are built on architectures of another age. These systems have been modernized to some extent but have roots that date back 10-30 years. They were designed to manage software solutions, not the scaling amount of data that companies these days have to manage.

The company offers a “pay as you grow,” solution. A customer adds more blocks to the grid as it sees fit. They never have to over-provision and pay for capacity they do not use.

Gridstore represents a new generation of storage providers that are causing considerable market disruption. Gridstore’s challenge comes down to scaling out its offering. Big storage providers may not have cutting edge technology but they do have sales and marketing channels that they can use to sell their newest offerings, often which are sold to customers often willing to stay with a trusted established vendor.