Is cold storage hot again?

Cold storage is gaining momentum, and a recent research report from IDC and SageCloud’s fresh round of funding validate this trend.

Boston-based cold data storage startup SageCloud announced today that it completed $10 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Braemar Energy Ventures, with participation from its existing investor, Matrix Partners.

Dr. Jiong Ma, a partner at Braemar Energy Venture, will also sit on SageCloud’s board as part of the new arrangement.

SageCloud provides reliable, cost-effective solutions to enterprises for cold storage, which is the storing of petabytes of data that, while important, aren’t frequently accessed. Data center professionals can now enjoy storage on disks at prices similar to storage on tapes.

“SageCloud has developed powerful system software that leverages open-standards enclosures and economical commodity drives to optimize energy efficiency and drive sustainability and long-term data preservation for customers’ data centers,” said Jeff Flowers, SageCloud’s founder and chief executive, in a statement. “In this way, we are revolutionizing the economics of data storage.”

Flowers previously cofounded the online backup company Carbonite.

With the new funding, SageCloud will accelerate the deployment of company’s products with initial customers and further expand its operations.

“We’re seeing the potential for a big disruption to the storage industry coming from the disaggregation of software and hardware. Hardware prices are being driven down by open standard hardware, referred to as Infrastructure 2.0, and commoditized components,” said David Skok, general partner at Matrix Partners, of SageCloud’s initiative.

The recent IDC report cites power management as a critical data center need, and it forecasts that the market for solutions to address energy-efficient data storage will exceed $25 billion by 2016.

Image credit: SageCloud