Faction raises $14 million for fully managed VMware Cloud on AWS services
Faction, a Denver, Colorado-based managed services provider for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), today revealed that it’s raised $14 million in equity and debt funding led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from existing investors River Cities Capital Funds, Sweetwater Capital, Meritage Funds, Charterhouse Strategic Partners, and Orix Growth Capital. It follows on the heels of an $18 million series B raise in March and brings the startup’s total raised to $49 million, according to Crunchbase, which CEO and founder Luke Norris said will be used to broaden Faction’s product portfolio and expand its global footprint.
“Throughout 2018, Faction saw an explosion of interest in customers looking for cost-effective solutions for running VMware Cloud on AWS. We have experienced impressive growth,” Norris said. “The need for high-performance and scale-out storage that can expand with customers’ needs across clouds including Azure, AWS, Google Compute Engine and VMware Cloud on AWS is only going to increase. This investment will enable us to reach more customers faster with an even stronger portfolio of managed multi-cloud solutions.”
Faction offers a suite of tools targeting enterprises with multicloud and hybrid cloud deployments, including Hybrid Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (HDRaaS), a data backup and migration solution for VMware Cloud on AWS; Cloud Control Volumes, a cross-cloud storage platform for private clouds, public clouds, and VMware Cloud on AWS; and Bloc, a hosted cloud powered by VMware.
Faction claims that Cloud Control Volumes, which is available in three tiers starting at $128 per terabyte, is one of the few cloud-attached storage products natively integrated with VMware Cloud on AWS — that is to say, connected via a low-latency layer 2 network and with persistent storage host-mounted to software-defined WMware datacenters. As for HDRaaS, it supports tools like VMware Site Recovery and Zerto, and Faction says its architecture only requires three nodes running at all times, theoretically reducing the amount of storage required in VMware Cloud on AWS.
Meanwhile, Bloc customers get up to 10Mbps internet bandwidth and a starting capacity of 50GB RAM, 10GHz CPU, and 1TB of flash-enhanced storage, and they’re able to connect their private clouds to on-premise datacenters, colocation providers, and public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google, and Bluemix.
“Faction’s patented technologies and services provide a powerful best-in-class solution for enterprises looking to extend their datacenters or migrate workloads to cloud,” Dell Technologies Capital managing director Daniel Docter said. “VMware Cloud Foundation and Faction, powered by leading storage platforms, are directly addressing customer demand for a multi-cloud world.”
Source: VentureBeat
