Growing Need For Storage Draws Funding

As companies commit more and more information to a digital format--everything from the human genome project to data mining projects--they need a place to stow it.

Two startups tackling the problem in different ways pocketed funding this week. Pirus Networks closed $27 million from BlueStream Ventures and strategic investors StorageNetworks Inc. and Veritas Software Corp. The company is developing a central component to combine disparate infrastructures for networks and storage without displacing existing protocols or storage systems. Ikadega Inc., which has created a server architecture designed specifically to transfer data and replace inefficient PC-centric systems, scored $8 million in its first institutional round of funding, led by Kettle Partners. Both companies will use the bulk of the money for development.

"This is a hot area now. EMC has been a wonderful success," says Michael Cahr, CEO and president of Ikadega. "The need for storage will increase dramatically in the coming years."

Not only is it difficult to keep up with the large amounts of data, Pirus CEO Richard Napolitano says, the pool of people accessing it is growing, and they're doing it from more than one location. Telecom companies, which have invested heavily in fiber-optic networks, have helped enable high-speed access to that data.