Storage SaaS vendor RainStor lands $7.5. million in new funding

RainStor, a SaaS provider of software for storing structured data in an enterprise or in the cloud, today said it raised $7.5 million in second round funding.
The company’s latest product, RainStor 3.5, was introduced in December 2009 and coincided with the six year old UK-based company’s entrance into the U.S. market, a name change from Clearpace and the opening of an office in San Francisco.
RainStor earned kudos from William Fellows, an analyst with The 451 Group, who said its solution removes one of the reservations businesses have about doing storage in the cloud.
“Rainstor is challenging one of the misconceptions around cloud computing: that it can’t be used for storing and analyzing database-centric data,” Fellows wrote in a report accessible from RainStor’s Web site. “We believe many businesses will be able to make a compelling case for … moving the data out of their datacenters and onto cheaper and more flexible cloud platforms.”
RainStor loads and compresses structured data (information that is stored in production databases, data warehouses, security and event log files) by typically a 40:1 ratio from any source and stores it on any storage platform. The company said its technology manages more inactive structured data with less hardware, storage and resources than other offerings.
Fellows’ June 2009 report states that RainStor doesn’t have much direct competition, but is indirectly in competition with industry giants HP and IBM through acquisitions each has made in the database archiving market in recent years. Smaller players with a similar approach to RainStor’s include CopperEye, illuminata Solutions, SenSage and Teradata.
“There is an enormous opportunity to address the needs of organizations that must keep massive and growing volumes of structured data accessible for regulatory or business purposes,” said Tim Danford, a managing director at Storm Ventures, in a prepared statement. Danford will take a seat on the RainStor board.
The latest round of funding comes from new funders Storm Ventures and Informatica, an enterprise data integration software vendor. Previous investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company also chipped in.