StorageWay Secures $36 Million Investment

StorageWay Inc. hopes to tap the growing need for more Internet storage — big time. The Fremont-based company added leading Internet hosting facility Exodus as a reseller a few weeks ago, and this week announced an additional $36 million in venture funding to fuel further growth.

Unlike other storage solutions, StorageWay delivers massive amounts of managed storage to file and Web servers in Internet data centers via what the company describes as “a telephone-like utility connection.” This eliminates the need for the businesses operating such data centers – or their clients – to get involved with the considerable fixed cost of setting up a high availability storage infrastructure, and the ongoing administrative costs and problems associated with managing that infrastructure.

“We have an organic storage model,” says Rob Commins, StorageWay’s Director of Product Marketing. “We can customize storage to the customer’s application, for example, streaming media versus a big Oracle database.”

StorageWay’s OutStore and OutBackup services provide Internet-related businesses with managed, outsourced storage, proportional, usage-based pricing and guaranteed service-levels. Commins says StorageWay will support as little as a 100 gigabyte in storage to allow a company to evaluate its service, up to many terabytes.

StorageWay has marketing and sales agreements with several large co-location hosting companies including Exodus and Level 3. In the first half of next year, Commins says StorageWay is slated to have 35 such agreements around the world.

“Our goal is to turn storage into a utility,” says Commins, “that works in the background and doesn’t require a lot of capital overhead to manage.”

The additional funding will be used for both ongoing product development and the build-out of StorageWay’s growing infrastructure at various Internet co-location centers.

“Storage service providers are generating a tremendous amount of buzz in the investment community, as well as in industry,” says Colin Savage, partner at Worldview Technology Partners, which joined original investors
Matrix, Montreux, and Redpoint in this latest round funding.