Terascala has closed a $14 million Series B funding round.  Strategic partners close to the company invested approximately fifty percent of the round, with Ascent Venture Partners, an early backer of the company, contributing the remainder.  Terascala will use the funding to significantly expand research and development, marketing, customer support, to develop strategic alliances, and to fuel international expansion.

“We’re thrilled to close our Series B round with a significant investment from industry leaders and continued support from Ascent,” said Steve Butler, CEO of Terascala.  “Our pioneering work in developing a software stack that delivers optimized, scalable I/O on industry-standard storage appliances enables organizations to accelerate big data applications, and clearly, industry leaders are taking notice.”

“Storage I/O optimization is rapidly becoming a core requirement for big data applications,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.  “Terascala is a leader in the development of solutions that address this requirement, and the fact that its product runs on an open source file system and on industry-standard platforms makes for a very compelling value proposition in a price sensitive market.”

Organizations worldwide use Terascala solutions to improve their ability to process pools of big data, which until now has been limited due to the lack of throughput abilities of standard file systems.  Terascala’s unique approach to high throughput, high capacity storage combines the Lustre file system, extensive analysis and optimization tools, integration and services into a state-of-the-art solution that accelerates big data applications running on large interconnected server installations and optimizes data access.

The Terascala Integrated Storage Information System (TISIS) provides appliance management and workload-driven I/O technology for open source Lustre, the world’s fastest parallel file system.  TISIS runs on industry-standard storage appliances in a wide range of market segments, including life sciences, financial services, energy, academic research, computer-automated engineering (CAE), and government/defense.

“Terascala solutions solve a huge problem in the marketplace today,” said Walter Dick, general partner at Ascent Venture Partners.  “Organizations are grappling with how to speed the delivery and analysis of big data sets.  Terascala’s approach, which accelerates big data applications through storage I/O optimization, is the answer for a great number of companies.”