NextIO, a vendor of I/O virtualization products, on Thursday announced that it has close on $12.3 million in funding. The Series F round from Adams, Capital Management, Crescendo Ventures, Dell Computer, JK&B Capital and VentureTech Alliance will be put to work for sales and marketing as well as product development. NextIO has received about $75 million in funding to date.

Iomega, a division of EMC, has extended their network storage offerings by adding their new Iomega StorCenter px12-450r NAS. The high-performance NAS is based on the new quad-core Intel Xeon E3-1200 v2 2.5 GHz processor. Iomega claims this is the first NAS to use the Intel Ivy Bridge CPU and chipset.

The StorCenter px12-450r uses a 12-bay, 2U rack-mount chassis. According to Iomega, the unit is designed “for advanced functions including dedupe, VDI, database and storage-based applications.” It ships with 8GB RAM and is expandable to 32GB RAM. It supports consumer-grade and server-grade SATA hard disks of up to 4GB capacity and will also support up to two 10GB Ethernet adapters. The unit is designed to support storage-based applications and Iomega is releasing a software development kit to assist software developers in the porting of applications to the system. One application currently supported is McAfee VSE anti-virus software, which ships with the system and includes a three-year license. Iomega says this is the first NAS in its class to include storage-based antivirus protection. VSE will be included with the entire StorCenter px product line starting in the third-quarter of 2012.

Like the rest of the px product line, the px12-450r can function as a private cloud. Iomega is also releasing apps for Android and Apple’s IOS to provide data access directly from smart phones and tablets.

Pricing for the px12-450r ranges from $7,499 to $13,000, depending on configuration.—Patrick H. Corrigan

Startup Pure Storage on Wednesday launched its second all-flash array with enhancements for high-availability, encryption, and FlashCare I/O management.

The FlashArray 300 Series, which contains the 2.0 release of the Purity operating system, is now available in an active/active configuration for high availability and failover. It incorporates Pure Storage’s FlashCare technology, which improves the longevity and reliability of the MLC flash memory Pure Storage uses in its array. FlashCare enables an optimized data layout, wear leveling, geometry-aligned writes, I/O micro-scheduling with QoS monitoring, and non-blocking reads and writes of data.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/systems/240000478?queryText=Pure+Storage

Quantum on Tuesday announced the StorNext M660, a new larger version of its metadata appliance. The device aims to store large numbers of objects generated from video editing, genomics, remote sensing, video surveillance, and seismic exploration applications.

Twice as large as the company’s M330 appliance, the StorNext M660 can store up to 800 million files in as many as eight file systems. The StorNext M660 can be integrated with Quantum Q-Series Storage for high-performance primary data as well as with the StorNext AEL Archive for near-line archiving.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/systems/240000421?queryText=quantum

HP today announced two new models of its Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) – the P6350 and P6550 – which support solid state drives and integrate the vSPhere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). Both enhancements enable increased application performance and utilization.

In addition, the two EVAs each have expanded cache and a useable capacity of 1.2PB of storage. They use SAS or SSD drives and are available now starting at $18,993. SSDs have a starting price of $9,800 and the Performance Advisor Software is $1,116.

Remembered by many to be a supplier of Macintosh hard drives, LaCie today announced a network attached storage system for small businesses (1-25 employees). The LaCie 2big NAS has a 2GHz processor and works with any PC, Macintosh or Linux workstation or laptop.

The LaCie 2big NAS is a two-bay enclosure It includes RAID 1 or data mirroring, Active Directory and has hot-swappable drives.

The LaCie 2big NAS is available without drives or in 6TB capacities starting at $299.00.

EMC on Tuesday debuted the VMAX SP, a multi-tenant VMAX for service providers, allowing them to rapidly deploy cloud storage services. The VMAX SP has a preconfigured storage service catalog and uses REST APIs for storage provisioning. It performs intelligent provisioning, data collection, monitoring and metering.

A self-service portal exists for chargeback, metering and usage and configuring tiers of service. The VMAX SP is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2012.

The company’s ‘Application-Crafted Storage’ is workload-optimized in that it adjusts to mixed workloads. The Starboard AC72 Storage System offers both NAS and SAN storage and supports both solid state and hard disk drives.

Deal reportedly worth $430 million

After weeks of rumors and speculation in the tech media, EMC on Thursday announced its acquisition of XtremIO. The Israeli business press is reporting a $430 million price tag for the company that is yet to generate revenue. We were impressed with the company’s de-duplication and scale-out technology when talked earlier this year. EMC was clearly impressed when they did their due diligence.

Why EMC? Perhaps a clue is that XtremIO chief technology officer Robin Ren is a VMware and EMC alumnus. The company was founded by a group of Israeli technology executives including CEO Ehud Rokach, Chairman Shuki Bruk, vice president of research and development Yaron Segev and Shahar Frank, chief scientist. Josh Goldstein joined XtremIO last year as vice president of marketing and product management. The company currently has offices in Herzliya, Israel and San Jose, Calif.

The timing of the announcement, a week ahead of the EMC World trade show in Las Vegas, says much about EMC’s intentions to vigorously market the technology.

The all-cash deal is a significant payout for XtremIO investors, which has amounted to $25 million to date from Jerusalem Venture Partners, Giza Venture Capital, Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures. The transaction follows acquisitions of Israeli firms Anobit by Apple and SanRad by solid state drive manufacturer OCZ in the past six months. Anobit developed significant technology for flash memory signal processing, while SanRad is a technology leader in storage virtualization and caching software.

The size and swiftness of the transaction, coming before any revenue generation, will certainly turn heads towards Nimbus Data, Violin Memory and Whiptail, all of which have generated significant revenue from all-solid state arrays. It is rumored that Violin has been preparing for an initial public offering, like Fusion-io (FIO) did last year that generated a market cap of close to $3 billion. A bidding war between other major storage manufacturers is also a possibility. One rumor is that EMC looked at Violin but decided it was too richly valued through multiple rounds of venture capital and major investments from leading flash memory manufacturer, Toshiba.

Our Take: We certainly congratulate our friends at XtremeIO and look forward to the products coming on the market. EMC has successfully integrated acquisitions of storage systems from manufacturers Isilon and Data Domain in recent years. The addition of a highly scalable, high performance array to the EMC product line is strategic and validates the importance solid state arrays in the market in general. –James E. Bagley

EMC is acquiring flash storage startup XtremIO for $430 million. XtremIO, who is still in beta trials with customers, makes an all-flash scale-out clustered storage system for storing primary data from databases, ERP and virtualized environments.

XtremIO, based in Israel, has received $25 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners, Giza Venture Capital, Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures.

While EMC did not report how much it paid for ExtremIO, the Globes newspaper of Israel claimed it as 430 million cash.