Gear6 Grabs $10M

I/O acceleration specialist Gear6 has clinched $10 million in Series B funding as the vendor ramps up plans to extend its product line further into database acceleration, cloud computing and virtualization.

The round, which was led by Horizon Ventures, also included existing investors U.S. Venture Partners and InterWest Partners, brings the startup's total funding to $24.5 million.

Up until now, most of Gear6's energy has been focused on selling its CACHEfx appliances into the financial, energy exploration, and animation markets, although this week's cash influx will extend the reach of its caching technology.

"I think what you're going to see from us is continued expansion into these areas, but also into other areas such as database acceleration, Web applications for cloud computing, and virtual environments," says Gary Orenstein, Gear6's vice president of marketing.

Placed in the data path on an Ethernet link between NAS filers and storage, the vendor's CACHEfx devices use high-speed RAM to increase the rate of I/O, something which Orenstein feels is critical in the world of virtualization."In a pre-virtualization environment you have got one OS and one I/O control point going out of the physical device to the storage platform," he says. "[With virtualization] you might have five or 10 VMs competing for that I/O link -- that's going to be a huge bottleneck."

Gear6 started shipping its first CACHEfx appliance, the G200, last year, touting the ability to deliver 250,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), 2 to 16 Gbit/s throughput, and microsecond response time.

Since then, the vendor has unveiled a scaled-down version of the G200, the G100, and is also looking to expand its business internationally.

"We just launched our channel partner program in February," says Orenstein, explaining that Gear6 has around a dozen U.S. partners, and will shortly announce a partner in Japan.

"That will be our first international expansion and you will see more international activity from us later this year."The Gear6 exec told Byte and Switch that the startup will also use the Series B money to grow its 40-strong workforce over the next 12 months. "If things go as well as we expect, we could easily be double that," he says. "We will be hiring in sales and marketing, engineering, and other functions such as customer support."

Despite all this activity, Gear6 is playing its customer cards close to its chest, and Orenstein refused to say how many firms are using the CACHEfx technology. Nor would he add any names to the startup's trio of publicly announced customers: D.E.Shaw, GX Technology, and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

The exec was little more forthcoming on when Gear6 would reach profitability. "Hopefully it will be very soon, but, as a private company, we can't disclose that detail," he says.

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