NexGen Storage has announced that it has secured Series A financing led by Grotech Ventures with participation from Access Venture Partners. The financing round will be used to accelerate product availability and recruit additional talent. NexGen Storage’s innovative storage area network (SAN) solutions deliver deterministic performance and Quality of Service (QoS) for virtual server environments.

“NexGen Storage has designed a revolutionary new storage system architected from the ground up to leverage the full power of solid state storage technologies,” said John Spiers, NexGen Storage co-founder and chief executive officer. “This new architecture enables 10 to 20 times the performance of traditional high performance SAN systems, and will set the standard for next generation storage – from small data centers to the cloud.”

NexGen Storage SAN solutions will be commercially available later this year.

“We believe the storage industry is on the cusp of a major transformation as shared storage architectures move from being designed around rotating disks to being architected for solid state storage technology,” said Lawson DeVries, principal, Grotech Ventures. “NexGen Storage is well positioned to capitalize on this transformation and to lead the market in delivering consistent, high performance storage and application QoS within virtual server environments.”

“Storage requirements of today’s virtual server environments exceed what traditional storage solutions provide – from performance to capacity efficiency, to power consumption and space utilization,” said Kirk J. Holland, venture partner, Access Venture Partners. “NexGen has the right team and the right technology at the right time to capitalize on this significant market opportunity, and to deliver the full power of solid state storage. We’ve known John Spiers and Kelly Long for almost a decade now through their success at LeftHand Networks, and we are pleased to partner with them in this next technology venture.”

NexGen Storage was founded in early 2010 by John Spiers and Kelly Long, NexGen Storage chief technology officer. Spiers is a 25-year storage industry veteran, and was a LeftHand Networks co-founder CEO/CTO. Long is a 20-year industry expert in architecting storage software and hardware solutions, and was a LeftHand Networks co-founder and chief software architect.