What Cloud? Nimble Grabs $25 Million For Storage And Backup Boxes

The cloud is the future, we’ve all heard it said. Ballmer’s all in, Jobs said it’s all in the cloud, and Schmidt made it the centerpiece of Google’s strategy in 2010. But we’ve also seen the danger of cloud outages, thanks to Amazon. So, in true rebel form, in spite of the dazzling prospects of the cloud, Nimble Storage is quietly offering an alternative — and investors are buying in.

Today, Nimble Storage, the developer of converged storage and backup solutions, announced that it has closed a $25 million series D round, adding to the $16 million series C it closed in November of last year. This brings total investment to $58 million. The round was led by Artis Capital Management, with contribution from existing investors, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital. The infusion of capital will be employed to expand into international markets, support existing growth, and is expected to bring the company to profitability.

Founded by former Data Domain and NetApp executives Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari, Nimble Storage has been selling its data storage and backup appliances like hot cakes, primarily because it is offering enterprise storage to small and medium sized enterprises that may not be able to afford IT teams — and those who don’t want to deal with a giant mess of servers. Nimble’s suite of four appliances combine storage, backup and disaster-recovery into a single solution, with each box offering different levels of raw storage capacity (up to 24 terabytes), flash capacity and connectivity speed.

Nimble’s solutions offer flash-accelerated primary storage performance, instant backup and restores, application-integrated data protection, and offsite disaster recovery — all from a single iSCSI system — effectively lowering equipment costs and streamlining storage management.

And what’s more? In March, Nimble Storage was named to The Wall Street Journal’s list of “The Next Big Thing”, so you know it has to be good. $41 million raised in the last 7 months doesn’t hurt either, even though that’s exactly how much Color raised. Look out!

For more on Nimble Storage’s backup and storage solutions, click here.