Cloverleaf Updates Smart Storage

Cloverleaf Communications has netted $11 million in new funding and released version 2.0 of its iSN intelligent storage networking system.

The third-round funding was led by new investor Hyperion Israel Venture Partners, with full participation by existing investors including Bank of America, Genesis and Elta Systems, which spun off Cloverleaf in 2001. The company has raised $25 million to date.

Cloverleaf President Richard Bauer said the company has a “considerable pipeline” of deals in the making, and boasts customers in the auto, manufacturing and telecom sectors.

The goal with potential customers, he said, is to get them in front of the demo systems the company has set up in the U.S. and Europe.

“When they do the demo, they’re in love,” Bauer said.

CEO Avi Weiss said the company has avoided “hype” and instead focused on developing “a sound, tested product first and foremost before stimulating end-user and channel interest. We’ve put most of our resources up to now into significant and focused product development, which has paid off substantially with our ability to deliver a comprehensive, tested system in much less time and using far less money than most other start-ups.”

Cloverleaf’s system, which consolidates heterogeneous storage and bandwidth and adds services such as virtualization and continuity, gets high marks from analysts.

“Cloverleaf has built excellent technology when it comes to enterprise-level heterogeneous virtualization, sparse provisioning, non-disruptive heterogeneous migration and serious scalability,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at the Taneja Group. “Their implementation being SPARC-based scared some customers off, but those that are still in the Sun camp will find the product worth looking at.”

iSN internal controllers are based on SPARC Solaris, which Cloverleaf will continue to support as it moves to Solaris 10 running on an x86 AMD Opteron platform.

iSN 2.0 improves on Cloverleaf’s data migration and business continuity capabilities and allows them to be implemented non-disruptively. iSN now includes support for Cisco’s SANTap service, providing all data migration and replication services out-of-band too. Management functionality has been boosted, creating a single system that can centrally manage, monitor and consolidate capacity, bandwidth and services across both SAN and NAS, regardless of vendors or technology.

Cloverleaf offers five fabric-based software services at the network level that are technology and vendor agnostic, including data migration, consolidation and provisioning, business continuance, simplified management of heterogeneous environments, and scaling and maximizing assets.

“Data centers managers today face a number of serious, costly, management headaches and are desperately in need of tools that can simplify their environment,” said COO and co-founder Joseph Klein. “iSN greatly simplifies this management with a single system offering core software services that support business processes and visibility across the entire storage network.”

Pricing for a Cloverleaf iSN system starts at about $220,000.

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