Blade announces $10M funding for data center gear
Santa Clara-based Blade Network Technologies, a maker of data center switches and other gear that competes with super-giant Cisco, has secured $10 million in funding led by NEC along with Juniper Networks. Founding investor Garnett & Helfrich Capital also bought into the new round, bringing Blade’s total funding to $40 million so far.
CEO Vikram Mehta (pictured), who came along from Nortel when Blade was spun off as an independent business, says the company has managed to compete with Cisco, 3Com and other established, large network gear makers because you don’t need a huge investment in hardware these days. “Our real story is software,” Mehta told me in a phone interview, before wryly adding, “If you’re turning a profit, you don’t need a lot of money.”
Blade relies on contract manufacturing and other outsourcing for its equipment, both top-of-rack switches and embedded switches that tie together entire six-foot high racks of servers, storage and other data center devices. The switches are pivotal now because “datacenter people today think in terms of a whole rack at a time,” rather than by the individual components inside them, Mehta said.
One very promising field for Blade is tying together racks full of disk drives as companies go beyond migrating their CPU servers into the cloud into pushing disk drives into the cloud, too.
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