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SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 11, 2007 – 4Blox, Inc.™, dedicated to improving iSCSI SAN performance, today announced that it has secured a round of private equity funding led by Flywheel Ventures and appointed new board of directors and advisory members. The company will use the funding to drive sales and marketing efforts and to further product development.
To drive the company’s momentum in the market,
it appointed industry veteran George Symons to
its board of directors and Mickey McIntire to
its advisory board.
“Our investment in 4Blox represents our belief
in the growth of iSCSI as a transformational
storage technology,” said Scott Caruso, general
partner with Flywheel Ventures. “4Blox has
developed a unique software-based approach to
performance that sets it apart from current
hardware-based iSCSI offload and acceleration
products.” 4Blox is a start-up venture that develops
software products that lower the host CPU
communications overhead associated with iSCSI-based
storage area networks. The most important
hardware resource for efficiently handling
increased load in iSCSI processing is CPU
capacity. iSCSI-based SANs experience severe
system performance degradation when used on
virtualized servers, with large numbers of users
or with bandwidth intensive applications – like
backup and video. The core product from 4Blox is
a set of software components used to expand CPU
processing capacity in iSCSI SANs.
“We are seeing wide and growing adoption of
iSCSI as a cost effective storage networking
technology that works with standard Ethernet,”
said Brian Garrett an industry analyst with the
Enterprise Strategy Group. “Combined with the
explosive growth of server virtualization and
growing interest in 10 GigE, ESG believes that
4Blox's unique approached to iSCSI CPU
optimization is poised for a great ride on a
rising wave of networked storage adoption."
Board members Scott Caruso and 4Blox CEO Dan
Munro will be joined by industry veteran and
current Yosemite Technologies CEO George Symons.
Yosemite Technologies provides small-to-medium
size businesses with applications designed to
simplify the way they protect and manage their
data. Mr. Symons joined Yosemite from EMC, where
he served as CTO for Information Management,
responsible for defining EMC’s product and
technical strategy.
The company also named former String Bean
Software CEO, Mickey McIntire to its advisory
board. String Bean Software was the developer of
WinTarget, a software-only iSCSI target acquired
by Microsoft Corporation in March 2006.
4Blox, Inc., is the first
software company dedicated to improving iSCSI
SAN performance. The company’s family of
software-based accelerators reduce the host CPU
processing overhead associated with iSCSI. As a
result, businesses enable higher connection
loads and the ability to take advantage of
higher network line speeds like 10GbE. For more
information on 4Blox please visit www.4Blox.com
Flywheel Ventures is a
venture capital firm that makes investments of
first institutional capital in the Mountain
West. Flywheel targets companies based on
innovations in information technology and the
physical sciences. The firm matches talented
entrepreneurs and market opportunities with
Flywheel's capital, entrepreneurial experience,
and industry relationships to accelerate
innovations into profitable companies. Flywheel
is based in Santa Fe and also has offices in
Albuquerque and San Francisco. For more
information on Flywheel, please visit www.flywheelventures.com
Contact:
Donna Michaels
Loughlin/Michaels Group
408-393-5575
email: donna@lmgpr.com
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