Blade announces $10M funding for data center gear

September 9, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

vikrammehtaSanta 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.”

products_rackswitches_424Blade 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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Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Eldon Hokke
    IMHO, It would be great if Blade's gear actually WORKED right.
    This stuff is HORRIBLE and I am never ordering another piece of their equipment.
    Seriously, how do they get away with having such crap gear? I haven't used anything this awful since the late 80's. It really says something that they have a "Cisco compatability mode" that only maybe 40% of the functionality is the same, and everything else is crap.