Acopia Gets $30M Cornucopia

Acopia Networks Inc. has scooped up a hefty $30 million round of Series B funding as it shoots for a summer ship date of its application-intelligent data-center switch, which is still under wraps (see Acopia Raises $30M Round).

The latest round -- which brings Acopia's total raised to date to around $40.5 million -- brings the company two new investors, Star Ventures and St. Paul Venture Capital. Also participating were Acopia's existing investors, Charles River Ventures, Accel Partners, and serial entrepreneur Cheng Wu, the company's (very wealthy) chairman.

The Chelmsford, Mass., company, found in January 2002, has just over 60 full-time employees. Chris Lynch, Acopia's president and CEO, says he expects to hire more sales and marketing personnel as it brings its first switch to market next month. Later this summer, Acopia plans to announce details of the product -- and, it hopes, customers. "It's safe to say we're preproduct at this point," says Lynch, who came to the startup last summer from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) (see Acopia Finds Another CEO).

Along with the funding, the company announced the appointment of Rami Kasterstein, partner with Star Ventures, and Zenas Hutcheson, managing general partner with St. Paul Venture Capital, to its board.

Acopia also this week announced the hiring of Brendan Howe as VP of marketing and business development and Philip Scott as VP of sales. Howe was formerly VP of marketing at Trebia Networks Inc., a storage processor startup that has gone through some turmoil lately. Scott was previously head of sales at Blue Coat Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI) (formerly called CacheFlow) (see Acopia Hires Two VPs, Trebia Gets Second Wind, and Is Trebia Up for Sale?).So what's Acopia up to, anyway? Naturally, it claims it's sui generis: If you believe the company's exuberant executives, it's developing nothing less than the first-of-its-kind product in an entirely new category of networking devices.

Acopia is being stingy with specific details of its Adaptive Resource Switch, but in general terms says it will be able to automatically reallocate storage and server resources based on application requirements. The switch will combine "server switching, file switching, and Web service switching to uniquely deliver an on-demand network infrastructure," according to company boilerplate.

"We transfer a new level of intelligence into the fabric," Lynch says. "I'm not aware of anyone in the startup space who is taking as holistic a view as we are." He says Acopia's vision is more in line with the "utility computing" (or "grid computing") models of IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) (see our report on Grid Networking).

Sun's N1 strategy is perhaps the closest, conceptually, to what Acopia is doing. Sun plans to integrate the server provisioning technology of Terraspring and the storage virtualization abilities of Pirus Networks -- two startups it bought last year -- under a single data-center management view (see Sun to Pilot N1 in Q1).

Howe notes that Acopia works at a different layer than the storage virtualization switches being developed by the likes of Cisco and Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) (via its acquisition of Rhapsody Networks) and startups like Candera Inc. and Maranti Networks."Those guys are doing block-level physical storage," he says. "If you bubble it up, we're sitting at a CIFS [Common Internet File System] or NFS [Network File System] level. That doesn't mean it's file-based singularly, but we would look at the stack from that perspective."

The two primary benefits Acopia says its switch brings to the data-center table are that it allows more efficient use of the existing IT infrastructure, and it provides a simpler management view. And though it sits in the data path, the switch doesn't require any changes to existing applications, Acopia claims -- it all just happens without human intervention, under the covers.

"The switch is able to interpret and react to application demands for data resources," says Lynch. "It acts as a mechanism to reclaim unused resources and make better use of existing resources." (Incidentally, acopia is a Spanish word that means "bringing together.")

It's an excellent elevator pitch, but of course Acopia has yet to prove it can actually perform all these magic tricks in real-world environments -- and convince customers to pay up. Then there's the fact that its primary competitors will be HP, IBM, and Sun, though smart startups have always been able to outmaneuver bigger predators. For now, Acopia has copped the cash to make a go of it.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch