VCs And Mergers, Friendly And Unfriendly, Show Investment In Storage Strong

On the VC front, officials at stealth-mode storage management software startup Arkivio on Monday said the company closed its Series B funding round with an extra $9.5 million in financing, bringing the total equity investment in the firm to $12.5 million.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Arkivio is developing software to allow IT administrators to analyze data and storage resource usage patters in order to help them optimize capacity utilization, forecast growth, and ensure data availability in heterogeneous SAN and NAS networks, the officials said.

The B round of financing was led by the $5 million invested by Voyager Capital. Other investors included previous investors JAFCO America Ventures and Moore Capital Management.

Officials of Sanera Systems, a developer of datacenter-class SAN switches, said the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup secured $10 million in equity financing from Goldman Sachs. This brings the total venture funding for the company to $66 million.

Officials at Imperial Technology, an El Segundo, Calif.-based developer of solid-state storage devices, on Monday unveiled that it just closed a second round of financing. The round was led by Celerity Partners, and included GMG Capital Partners, but officials refused to discuss the value of the investment other than to say the total invested in the company including this round was $11 million.

Imperial is expected to unveil new solid-state data storage drives within the next 60 days, the officials said.

Friendly and unfriendly mergers also made the news.

Alanco Technologies, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based group of companies including NAS provider Excel/Meridian Data and legacy computer system storage upgrade provider Arraid, on Monday executed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held wireless RF tracking technology developer Technology Systems International, also of Scottsdale.

TSI's technology is used for area security management and personnel monitoring systems, and is currently focused on the corrections institutions market. The acquisition was actually unveiled in December, but was put on hold due to NASDAQ requirements.

DataMirror on Monday made a hostile takeover bid for Idion Technology Holdings.

DataMirror, a Toronto-based developer of data storage management software, on March 16 proposed the acquisition of Idion, a Johannesburg, South Africa-based developer of high availability and resiliency software for IBM iSeries servers, but was rejected.

DataMirror is offering about 5.6 cents per share, or a total of $6.2 million, for Idion, which company officials said represents about a 70 percent premium for Idion's shareholders.

Last Friday, officials of Agile Storage, a start-up developer of hardware and software aimed at consolidating SAN and NAS architectures, grabbed a Series B round of venture capital investment worth $26 million.