Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

VCs: Who's Hot?: Page 2 of 4

Right now, the top spot on our VC scoreboard goes to Battery Ventures which has five active investments in storage-related
companies, having led (or co-led) the Series A financings for
Akara, Kashya, Storigen Systems, Storability, and Sangate Systems.

These investments are a bet on the convergence of NAS and SAN technologies into a single appliance and storage becoming a managed service deliverable over wide-area networks.

Second place on the list is shared by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) from Menlo Park, Calif., and OneLiberty Ventures, based in Cambridge, Mass. Both have invested in no fewer than four storage startups.

OneLiberty clearly has a penchant for high-end datacenter technology, most notably Infiniband systems. Its the lead investor in Infiniswitch, a company building Infiniband-based switches, and VIEO, a startup writing software to manage Infiniband applications. Duncan McCallum, a partner with OneLiberty, also advised it to invest in Storigen (see Storigen: Echoes of Akamai) and DataCore Software (see
Virtualization Vendors Vie for OEMs).

NEA has a taken a different tack, with investments in companies targeting the enterprise storage market. 3Ware, for example, provides a switch and storage system in-one that fits snugly under a desk, while DataCore’s software runs on Windows NT servers, commonly used by small and medium-size businesses. Additional investments include Troika (see Top Ten Private Storage Networking Companies) and Confluence Networks.