Other participants included Samsung Ventures and individual investors Andy Bechtolsheim and Pradeep Sindhu as the company emerged from stealth to bring AWS-like elastic block storage to enterprises and service providers.

The creators and maintainers of the Linux IO storage stack, Marc Fleischmann, Nicholas Bellinger and Claudio Fleiner, founded Datera in 2013 to bring hyperscale operations and economics to private and public clouds. Datera's first product -- Datera Elastic Data Fabric -- is scale-out storage software that turns standard, commodity hardware into a RESTful API-driven, policy-based storage fabric for large-scale clouds. Datera Elastic Data Fabric is already being used in production by multiple large enterprises and service providers worldwide.

'Khosla Ventures invests in category-defining infrastructure companies that automate the agile IT era,' said Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures. 'There's a fundamental shift going on in data centers towards seamless automation. Datera has assembled a world-class team to deliver the type of intelligent software we believe is emerging as the foundation of next-generation cloud data centers. Now proven with customers, Datera's intelligent infrastructure software is changing the game for anyone needing to deploy cloud scale-out storage.'

Datera has a world-class team with deep expertise in distributed policy management, hyperscale storage systems and Linux IO optimization. Datera also has an exceptional advisory board including Carl Waldspurger, Steve Kleiman, Michael Dvorkin, Martin Buhr, Eric Baldeschwieler and Steve Mullaney.

'In the cloud era, the way the data center is managed and operated is fundamentally different. Datera believes customers in this world need technology partners that make hyperscale operations and economics possible,' said Marc Fleischmann, Co-Founder and CEO of Datera. 'Our team, together with visionary investors and renowned advisors, is focused on building products specifically designed for customers in this new world.'

About Datera

Founded by the authors and maintainers of the Linux I/O storage stack, Datera brings hyperscale operations and economics to private and public clouds. Datera's products are used in production by large enterprises and service providers worldwide. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA and is backed by Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Silicon Valley luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim and Pradeep Sindhu. For more information, visit http://datera.io or follow @DateraInc on Twitter.