Exablox, the award winning company re-imagining storage, today announced that it has received a $16 million Series-C funding round. Dell Ventures is now a strategic investor, joining existing investors DCM Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. This investment again validates Exablox's unique vision for delivering scale-out object storage to every organization. Exablox has now received $38.5 million in total funding.

The recent IDC Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2014-2018 Forecast Report projects that the file-and-object-based storage (FOBS) market will be $43.4 billion in 2018. IDC also states that by 2018 scale-out solutions will account for approximately 80% of the FOBS market.1 With traditional models storage often has been purchased on a three- to four-year refresh cycle, forcing IT organizations to overprovision storage in anticipation of future business needs, which often results in forklift upgrades as business requirements change. This antiquated approach does not fit in an era of overwhelming growth in unstructured data, big data and the Internet of Things. Exablox's OneBlox scale-out architecture provides a highly scalable solution that eliminates forklift upgrades and enables IT organizations to nearly instantaneously scale storage capacity, performance and/or availability to exactly meet their current business needs.

The demand for Exablox's OneBlox object-based storage solution has resulted in more than a 13-fold year-over-year increase in both customers and number of appliances sold. The company has seen strong traction across a wide range of industries including higher education, legal, medical and manufacturing organizations.

Exablox has developed its own object-store that is tightly integrated with a distributed file system delivering rich enterprise class features such as inline deduplication, continuous data protection, remote replication and seamless scalability to SMB and NFS-based applications. The result is a storage product that is notably simpler to deploy and manage than legacy storage solutions. With OneBlox, most tasks require zero-configuration and are completed in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days.

Exablox's OneSystem is the industry's first cloud-based storage management application. Unique in the industry, OneSystem has saved countless hours for organizations by providing anywhere, anytime access for storage configuration, management and monitoring tasks. With the ability to perform all storage management tasks from anywhere in the world, OneSystem is giving storage administrators a new level of freedom in serving their users.

Exablox is led by CEO Douglas Brockett, former vice president and general manager of SonicWALL. Brockett played a key role in establishing SonicWALL as a global leader in the advanced network security space. SonicWALL was acquired by Dell in 2012 for $1.2 billion.

Supporting Quotes:

'Exablox has a unique storage architecture that delivers the benefits of object-based storage to the mid-market, without the associated complexity,' says Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager of Dell Storage. 'OneBlox offers a powerful, yet simple, solution that enables IT organizations to rapidly deploy systems and applications.'

'With the realities of the changing data landscape, the many limitations of legacy scale-up storage architectures based on RAID are putting IT organizations' storage infrastructure at a breaking point. Exablox has broken away from the legacy mindset with its mid-market storage offering,' said Simon Robinson, research vice president at 451 Research. 'OneBlox combines the best of both worlds. It offers all of the benefits of object storage: scale-out, cost effectiveness and commodity hardware support, with the ubiquitous NFS and SMB file system access, simply delivered in an appliance.'

'The reality is that the storage technologies that have served organizations over the last few decades will not solve the business problems of the future,' said Douglas Brockett, CEO of Exablox. 'Legacy storage vendors have held on to the old way of doing things for far too long, and the market is correcting itself. We believe storage should be as dynamic as the business it serves.'

About Exablox

Exablox is the company reimagining storage. Exablox solves businesses' runaway storage costs and information management nightmares by providing a cloud-managed, scale-out object-based solution that is affordable and easy to use. OneBlox is an inclusive storage offering that combines an elegant hardware architecture and integrated, enterprise-grade software, including inline deduplication, continuous data protection and disaster recovery. Founded in 2010, Exablox is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and backed by leading Silicon Valley venture firms. Visit Exablox online at www.exablox.com and join the conversation at www.twitter.com/exablox.