Copan Claims $32M in New Funding

MAID specialist COPAN announced $32.4 million in Series D funding today as the vendor prepares to flesh out its product line and eyes a long-term IPO.

The round, which was led by Battery Ventures, also included Austin Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, Pequot Ventures, Credit Suisse, Gold Hill Capital, Presidio STX, and NTT Leasing Capital. The round brings the vendor's total funding to $88.4 million since 2002.

"We're going to use the money to accelerate product programs and widen our distribution," says Jon Mellon, Copan's senior vice president of marketing, explaining that the firm is planning a major product announcement within the next 30 days. "You're going to see a combination of hardware and software capabilities," he added, but would not divulge any additional details.

Copan is one of a number of vendors, including Nexsan, Fujitsu, and NEC, that are touting MAID as a way for users to reduce their storage costs by dynamically powering disks up and down in response to access demands.

In addition to the imminent hardware and software announcements, Copan recently revealed plans to bulk up its database archiving, adding software that will run on top of its MAID operating system and act as an interface between Oracle APIs and the LUNs on the Copan array.The vendor is also planning to launch records management software that can trawl through unstructured data, offering full read/write capabilities for file system searches. At the moment, Copan offers a read-only capability for records management.

"You will see the database capability by the end of the year -- we're in final tests right now," says Mellon, adding that the souped-up records management software is likely to debut in the first quarter of 2008.

Copan will also use the Series D to build its international business, particularly in EMEA, the Asia/Pacific region, and Japan. "There will be an aggressive investment in Japan and China," says Mellon, explaining that the vendor will add around 60 people to its 143-strong global workforce by this time next year, largely in engineering and sales.

The exec denies that the Series D was necessitated by the vendor running out of cash. "It's giving us the available capital to bring new products to market sooner," he says -- but he's not saying when Copan will be profitable.

Long-term, Mellon says that Copan is keen to join the growing list of storage vendors going public. "Our aim is to IPO. W're building a company that can stand on its own. It's practical that something like that could happen in the next two to three years, if not sooner."MAID systems typically use a small number of spinning disks that serve as a cache for a set of non-spinning, passive disks. If a data request is not found in the cache, the appropriate passive disks are powered up. The technology is gaining higher visibility at the moment, as users wrestle with spiraling power costs and space considerations, although there remains some resistance to the technology from end-users uncomfortable with the concept of turning off disks. The other issue cited as a major drawback of MAID is performance, compared to other disk-based technologies such as SATA and optical disk. Since disks must be woken up and spun in response to an access request, the performance won't match that of already spinning disks.

Copan is still keeping specific details of its customer list close to its chest, although Mellon confirms that the vendor has more than 100 customers.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.