Nexenta Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, today announced that it closed out 2012 with business growth that exceeded the company plan in terms of revenue, partner growth, partner sales, and customer adoption. Faced with this growth and opportunity, the company has secured $24 million in Series D financing.

Nexenta also announced the appointment of Mark Lockareff as chief executive officer, with former CEO Evan Powell assuming the new role of chief strategy officer. With 25 years' experience growing, leading, and investing in disruptive technology companies, Mark Lockareff will drive Nexenta's next stage of growth as Software-defined Storage rapidly changes the dynamics of the IT technology market.

Nexenta's over-subscribed Series D financing is being led by new investor Four Rivers Group, with participation by existing Nexenta investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Razor's Edge Ventures, and West Summit Capital. In addition to Four Rivers, new strategic investors Presidio Ventures and UMC Capital participated.

This round of investment is testament to the momentum and growth that the company has experienced in the last 12 months and to the company's leadership of the transformation of the storage industry. Key highlights include:

The number of Nexenta-powered storage deployments of one petabyte or greater grew by a factor of 10.
Revenue growth doubled year-over-year; the company has experienced triple digit growth for three consecutive years.
Adoption of NexentaStor exceeded the 5,000 customer deployment milestone, while follow-on sales to existing customers expanded by 475 percent.
Total storage under management now exceeds 660PB and Nexenta has enabled an estimated $400 million in hardware storage sales for its reseller partners.
The company's global reach continues to expand with active partners growing by 75 percent since January 2012. Nexenta has established official subsidiaries and teams in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, and Japan.
Nexenta expanded its product portfolio with the launch of NexentaVSA for View for managing and deploying virtualized environments.

New CEO Lockareff has led or invested in a number of enterprise infrastructure, software and internet companies during their key growth stages including: ParAccel, Agiliance, Softricity, Model N, Riverbed, Acopia, ProofPoint, and Facebook.

In addition to Lockareff's appointment, Bridget Warwick is joining Nexenta as chief marketing officer. Warwick previously held senior marketing positions at BlueArc Corporation (acquired by Hitachi Data Systems) and NetApp. These strategic additions to the executive team follow the October 2012 appointment of Rick Martig as chief financial officer, and reflect Nexenta's transition from a disruptive and explosive start-up to the trusted and innovative storage partner for thousands of companies all over the world.

"Nexenta provides the ideal storage to support Hosting.com's cloud hosting services and our customers' mission-critical applications. No other technology can match Nexenta's price-to-performance, which has helped us offer competitive and differentiated services to companies all over the world. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship between our two companies," said Hosting.com CTO Matt Ferrari.

"Our task at Nexenta is simple: we must build a company that is up to meeting the enormous opportunity of leading the transformation of the storage industry. The transition to Software-defined Storage is accelerating because customers must have greater flexibility, performance, and savings in their storage if they are to compete. I'm confident that Mark and Bridget will help us do an even better job for our customers, resellers, and strategic partners," said Powell.

About Nexenta Systems:

Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at significantly less cost than legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/store/resellers-search.