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BLADE Network Technologies Secures $10 million in Series B Funding
si Team
Sunday, October 4, 2009
BLADE Network Technologies, a provider of Gigabit and 10G Ethernet cloud-ready networking solutions for enterprise data centers worldwide, has closed $10 million in Series B funding with new investors led by NEC along with Juniper Networks. Garnett and Helfrich Capital, BLADE's founding investors, also bought into the new round, bringing BLADE's total funding to $40 million so far.

With the current funding, the total value of the company reached $230 million. BLADE is likely to use the investment to ramp up R&D, sales, and marketing. The company is planning to develop a 64-port 10G top-of-rack switch and management products for virtualized data centers, and aims to be the first vendor in the industry to unveil 10G switches at less than $100 per port.

Established as a division of Nortel in 2002, it spun out as an independent company with the financial backing of Garnett and Helfrich Capital in February 2006. Recently, the company surpassed six-millionth Ethernet switch port installation milestone. Through its partnerships with HP, IBM, NEC, and Verari Systems, BLADE Network holds a commanding marketshare lead over Cisco in blade server networking. "Of the total revenue, 40 percent comes from Europe, 40 percent from the U.S., and 20 percent from Asia," says Vikram Mehta, President and CEO, BLADE Network Technologies.

The company, with its 200 employees, is helping more than 300 of the Fortune 500 companies across 26 industry segments, for an installed base representing over six billion switch ports connecting over 1,350,000 servers and storage systems.
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