California: Parascale, a provider of cloud storage solutions for rich media content in traffic-intensive applications, today announced that it has closed an $11.37 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Parascale plans to use the funding for product development and marketing initiatives in preparation for the launch of Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS), an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols.

Parascale was founded on the premise that advances in computer hardware over the past 10 years make it possible for file storage, management, and distribution solutions to be more reliable, easier to manage, and less expensive to purchase and operate than ever before. Adopting the best technologies available, Parascale has developed a new class of storage solutions designed to support the wave of content-intensive applications, including video-on-demand, digital document archiving, scientific data analysis, video surveillance and medical image remote diagnosis among others. The company's PCS software is patented technology, which automatically and transparently migrates and replicates files among storage nodes to balance and optimize performance without interruption in client access.

"The trend is towards the use of cloud storage which enables the storing of digital content at around a half dollar per gigabyte. But the technology to deliver it requires some advanced thinking and real engineering. That is precisely what Parascale delivers. By providing the intelligence to power cloud storage, Parascale will offer the right performance, scalability, and ease of management. In helping store huge amounts of digital content cheaply, Parascale technology will impact many, many industries' from entertainment to genomics and medical imaging to security, and beyond," Bruce Sachs, general partner, Charles River Ventures.

"It was clear when we first saw Parascale that the company was going to be a significant winner," said John Jarve, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures. "The team, the cloud storage opportunity, and the software only business model were very attractive to us, and their technology is truly disruptive. With Parascale's offerings, content owners can easily roll their own cloud, and service providers can deploy massive cloud storage offerings without needing a large IT team to manage it."

"With Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, we have the two premier investors in the storage space supporting our company," said Sajai Krishnan, Parascale CEO. "In the very specific technology domain where Parascale operates , clustered storage, Charles River�s success with EqualLogic has been the best clustered SAN-storage exit. Menlo's investment in Spinnaker Networks has been arguably the best clustered NAS-storage exit. It is an honor to have Bruce Sachs of Charles River and John Jarve of Menlo on our board. Their voting with their wallets in leading the Series A round, is an affirmation of Parascale's team, business model and opportunity."