Attune Racks Up $14M

NAS management startup Attune Systems picked up new funding today to help it compete as a newcomer in a hot technology space. (See Attune Gets $14M and Top 10 Startups to Watch.)

Attune Marketing VP Dan Liddle says the 50-person startup will use the $14 million mostly to raise its profile and make enhancements to its product line before the end of the year.

After failing in its first attempt as Z-Force, Attune re-emerged in May with its Maestro File Manager appliance used to manage aggregate NAS systems. (See Attune Launches Virtualization.) Attune picked the right problem to try and solve, as NAS management has become a big pain point for storage administrators. Attune and competitors use global namespace and other features to help organizations manage files across multiple NAS devices.

Interviews with more than 150 Fortune 1000 firms by market research firm TheInfoPro (TIP) found file virtualization the most popular technology in terms of implementation plans. (See File Virtualization's Red Hot.) Rob Stevenson, TIP managing director, says this is largely because the average NAS implementation has gone from 50 Tbytes to 150 Tbytes over the last 18 months among companies surveyed.

Yet Attune was not among the file virtualization vendors mentioned in the survey, conducted between July and September, the same time Attune was getting out of the starting gate. NAS vendors EMC and Network Appliance and file virtualization pure-play Acopia led the way with startup NeoPath also getting mentions. (See Acopia Files Away $20M.)