Infineta Systems, co-founded by Raj Kanaya and K.V.S. Ramarao, has closed series A round of venture capital funding, with $15 million from Alloy Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. Founded in 2008, the San Jose headquartered company develops and markets a line of high performance network optimization products. With the bountiful support from Series A funding, it plans to pioneer a new category of products that will help Global 2000 enterprises address the explosion in inter-data center traffic resulting from mission critical storage replication, backup, and emerging ‘private’ cloud applications. These products will be based on the company’s patent-pending Velocity Dedupe Engine™, the industry’s first ever hardware based network deduplication technology.

“We see a demand with Global 2000 enterprises or large Web properties that are struggling to move the ever increasing volume of traffic between their data centers. We solve this problem by delivering the accelerated inter-data center network fabric - providing optimization for critical traffic workflows that require high speed and low latency performance across the wide area network,” says Kanaya, CEO, Infineta Systems. “So, out of the gate, we will bring immense benefits to large enterprises that are conducting big SAN replication and storage backup jobs. Gradually, we will begin also to support the WAN bandwidth and performance needs of such emerging use cases as long distance live migrations, active/active storage redundancies across multiple data centers, and more.

Despite a large market opportunity, only a few infrastructure companies have been funded in the past few years. This sector requires a large amount of capital investment to get a scalable business up and running. Based on its rollup analysis from meetings with customers and primary analyst research, Infineta sees an initial market opportunity in the range of $2 billion. Anticipating competition in the sector, Kanaya highlights the company’s uniqueness with the fact that no company until now has directly addressed the inter-data center network fabric issue. “Others have tackled the issue of WAN optimization but primarily in the context of optimizing traffic between users residing in branch offices and data centers. The customer problem we solve is fundamentally different,” he says. With its focus on significant technology innovation and a management team with proven track record, the 20 people strong company looks forward to revolutionizing inter-data center WAN acceleration.