Tokyo, Japan-based Hitachi made the investment through its Corporate Ventures Capitalist fund and was joined by venture capital firm Nippon Venture Capital Co Ltd in an undisclosed level of series B funding, as well as storage hardware vendor Advanced Technology and Systems Co Ltd, Nissei Capital, Daiwa Bank and Kokusai Capital.
Mountain View, California-based MVD was formed by the former CEO of Turbolinux Inc, Cliff Miller, in 2001 to focus on the development of storage virtualization and file synchronization technology. In February this year the company acquired PowerCockpit, which was originally developed by Turbolinux but was retained by the company’s US management team when its Linux distribution business was sold to Japanese software house Software Research Associates Inc in August 2002.
PowerCockpit is a cross-platform tool for the provisioning and management of large server farms, which had in the past been licensed to Hewlett-Packard Co for use with both its HP Blade Server products and Compaq ProLiant BL server blades, as well as Egenera Inc for use on its BladeFrame servers. PowerCockpit supports Microsoft Corp’s Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro as well as the Turbolinux, Red Hat, SuSE and Debian Linux distributions.
MVD also offers MVD Powered NAS, an advanced operating system solution for network attached storage (NAS) appliances; MVD Sync, a live, continuous replication and backup solution; and MVD Snap, a software tool for creating a snapshot view of files and directories in a journal file system for backup and recovery.
As well as making this investment, Hitachi also plans to adopt MVD’s server provisioning and network storage software on its hardware, it said. Meanwhile, MVD itself said that it is lining up another large corporate investor for an additional round of funding that is due to close in early May.
Source: Computerwire
