Nexenta has announced that it has received $21 million in Series C funding led by Menlo Ventures, along with Sierra Ventures and Razor's Edge Ventures. The enterprise storage specialist says that the current round of funding will be used to sustain its growth and global expansion, and to scale its support; the California-based company previously received funding from Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink Capital.

The company is best known for the open source Nexenta Core Platform (NCP), a hybrid distribution that combines an OpenSolaris kernel with an Ubuntu userland and Solaris features such as the ZFS file system, and NexentaStor, its ZFS-based storage appliance built on top of NCP. The company is also a sponsor of the open source community fork of OpenSolaris, Illumos, which the company is in the process of switching to as the basis for its software.

In a statement, Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta, said: "This investment will enable us to make enterprise class storage for everyone a reality for tens of thousands more partners and end users around the world", adding that "We had choices when we decided to raise a growth round and I couldn’t be happier to be partnering with Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures as we seek to open up one of the last bastions of antediluvian lock-in based business models in enterprise IT".

Nexenta's NexentaStor is available as a free Community Edition and as a commercial Enterprise Edition that includes support for commercial plug-ins, technical support and no capacity restrictions.

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(crve)