Data Backup Digest

Paula Long is an entrepreneur who co-founded EqualLogic, a company who specialised in making cheap and efficient storage technology. The firm was acquired by Dell back in 2007 for a tidy $1.4 billion, at the time the largest ever cash purchase of a private venture backed technology company. But that didn’t stop Long from wanting to continue innovating.

EqualLogic employed the use of ISCI, which allowed the building of Storage Area Networks through Ethernet. The tech allowed storage to be accessible through the internet and locally available. Nowadays that’s common place, but at the time it was a revolutionary move.

DataGravity aims to create benefits for businesses that have never been done before through a data storage array. The company was founded in 2012 and to date has raised $92 million over the course of its life, making it one of the largest funded private New England tech firms.

“Our objective was to do something very, very different in storage technology … we’ve been extracting insights about data and users from their storage systems, and we’re starting to see some really interesting perspectives,” said John Joseph, president and co-founder, back in 2014.

Long claims that the company is “poised to be the benchmark for what data storage will be in the future” and it seems that many others agree – the company has recently raised $50 million in Series C round investment, led by Accel Partners and supported by investors Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and General Catalyst Partners.

DataGravity’s primary line is called the Discovery Series, the first data aware storage platform. It tracks data access and analyses the data as it is being stored in order to gain greater visibility and value into a company’s assets.

“Traditional storage systems have been containers for lots of data. Now we’re changing the stakes completely, and focusing on the information that’s contained within the data in a storage system,” said John Joseph, DataGravity president.

The company say that approximately 80 percent of the data produced globally is unstructured, which can leave businesses finding it hard to organise data generated by humans, let alone benefit from it.

“We’re the first people to let the array tell you about the data that it’s holding. And that’s important given unstructured data’s growth—you can’t manage something you don’t understand,” said Long.

Whenever someone opens, edits or saves a file, the Discovery Series tracks who made the changes, what they did and how they did it. You’ll be able to see the whole history of that file over time.

The Discovery Series costs from $50000 to $100000 and is targeted at midmarket companies who wish to gain better insight from the data they are storing, along with the benefits of data governance, security and search.

The company plan to use the latest funding for sales, customer service, product development and general growth in the next phase of the company’s life.

More information about DataGravity can be found on the company’s official website, which includes the ability to register for a demo of the product and check it out for yourself.