VentureBeat

Enterprise storage is a market dominated by big companies. But Panasas has found a niche providing parallel storage systems for the biggest supercomputers. The company has raised $25 million in a fifth round of funding, VentureBeat has learned.

The Fremont, Calif.-based company declined to comment on the funding. The round was led by Focus Ventures of Palo Alto, Calif. Other investors included Mohr Davidow Ventures, Carlyle Venture Partners, Centennial Ventures, and Northgate Capital Partners.

The company’s web site says it focuses on the parallel storage market in competition with NetApp, EMC, Sun Microsystems and IBM. It can do so because it has a unique architecture to deliver the best storage performance in high-bandwidth applications such as simulations, modeling, oil and gas exploration, and product design.

Most clusters of Linux servers use an architecture dubbed a “network file system,” or NFS. But such systems with a “serial” architecture bog down when a lot of users are trying to access the same file at the same time. Panasas has a parallel file system that can accommodate all of those users in parallel. It builds a kind of “unified memory” storage system that resembles the kind of unified memory of SGI supercomputers. In fact, SGI is a major reseller of Panasas’ storage systems, as is Dell.

The architecture is the brainchild of Garth Gibson, who was one of the inventors of the popular RAID storage systems that are popular today because they can store data reliably across a bunch of disk drives. Currently chief technology officer, Gibson started Panasas in 1999. The first products shipped in 2003 and the company is now on its third generation of ActiveStor products that can store up to 200 terabytes of data per rack or up to 100 petabytes in a single file system. (Our description: That’s a lot of data).

Among start-ups, the competition included Cluster File Systems, but Sun Microsystems acquired that company in October. Panasas’ storage system was part of Roadrunner, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s supercomputer with a petaflop of computing performance. The supercomputer, announced a few weeks ago, will have 12,900 microprocessors, including the Cell chips that serve as the brains of Sony PlayStation 3 video game consoles.

updated

Bubble Motion, a Silicon Valley company that gives you a way to send text messages (SMS) with your voice instead of text, has raised $14 million in additional funding.

It came from existing investor Sequoia Capital, and new investors Comcast Interactive Capital and NCD Investors.

The company says in a statement that it has more than 135 million users worldwide, which we haven’t confirmed, but it sounds inflated. (Could the company really mean the technology is enabled by carriers that have that many users? We’re asking for more info. Update: Our suspicion was founded; see below)

The lets you click on a key, talk, and send a short message — which Bubble Motion argues is effective because it lets you show emotion in ways that a regular text, IM or email don’t.

We first wrote in detail about the company nine months ago, when it first raised $10 million, and when it said 15 percent of subscribers to Vodafone Egypt were using the service.

Update: Turns out, the company’s 135 million number represents the number of users served by carriers Bubble Motion has partnered with. The actual number of people using the voice text is only a percentage of that. David Still, product manager, wouldn’t divulge the number, but said India is the largest market for its actual users and fastest growing. Its carrier partner there has 57 million subscribers, only a percentage of has used Bubble Motion. Bubble Motion is still not accessible within the U.S. With Comcast as an investor, Bubble Motion is hoping to turn up the discussions it is having with U.S. carriers, Still said. A company called Kirusa is Bubble Motion’s closest competitor.

ConSentry, a Silicon Valley startup that says its Internet network switches are more efficient than those of giant incumbent Cisco, has raised a $21 million round of funding.

Switches are components that route traffic from through the wider Internet network.

However, large corporations that buy switches to route their traffic often demand security feature to control access (sometimes called Network Access Control). As networks have become faster, security has become more of a challenge, Consentry said.

ConSentry’s switches are designed from the ground up to include NAC that can continuously control the access levels of users on a network, even at hard-wired LAN speeds. Contractors using a company’s network, for example, would have their privileges set when first logging on, but the network would continously monitor their behavior — not allowing suspicious behavior during the session.

NAC is a growing market, with more customers demanding high-level security for their networks. ConSentry made news earlier this year, when two schools each replaced several dozen Cisco switches with ConSentry products.

Smaller competitors also focusing on NAC include Rainier.

The $21 million funding is Consentry’s fourth round. It was led by new investor Teachers’ Private Capital. Other funds participated, including previous backers Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, INVESCO Private Capital and DAG Ventures, and new investors Translink Capital and NCD Investors.

Consentry, based in Milpitas, Calif., has almost 100 employees, and has taken about $72 million in funding to date.