Amplidata: New CEO, New $6 Million Funding Round

The new CEO is Mike Wall, an experienced storage executive who most recently served as president and CEO of Atempo, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based data management software vendor that late last year was acquired by Naples, Fla.-based ASG Software Solutions.

Prior to that, Wall was a founding member of Intel's storage division management team.

[Related: Amplidata Intros Massively Scalable Storage ]

The new $6 million round of funding brings the total to-date investment in the company to $20 million. Existing investor Intel Capital and new investor Quantum contributed to the round.

Quantum uses Amplidata technology in its own product line on an OEM basis.

Amplidata, which develops storage technology to handle massive amounts of data, last year introduced, AmpliStor, which has the potential to store billions of data objects on hundreds of petabytes of capacity.

Amplidata focuses on making sure data is available, Wall said. "It's an active archive product for big data with extreme data protection capabilities, up to 15 nines of protection for half the price of legacy systems," he said.

Customers can set the level of availability they require based on how important access to the data is, Wall said. "We enable the customer to set policies in realtime without taking the system down," he said. "For instance, for a single site, a customer could set a 16-4 policy, which means that with 16 nodes, up to four nodes could go down without impacting the system."

AmpliStor depends on complex mathematical concepts to take data protection beyond traditional RAID, Wall said.

"We've had products in the market for about four years," he said. "We've never lost a single byte of data that I know of. I'm the new CEO, but none that I know of."

Amplidata currently has a small direct sales force, but Wall said one of his priorities is to enlarge its indirect sales channel. The company recently hired a consultant to help expand it channel presence and has signed up about a half-dozen partners, he said.

"Our product is for technical partners, the ones with heavy consulting experience," he said. "We help customers solve problems they couldn't solve before without a huge investment."

PUBLISHED SEPT. 12, 2012