Storage firm Xiotech nabs $10 million in funding

Storage vendor Xiotech announced $10 million in new funding this month and is reportedly preparing to appoint a new CEO.

In addition to the $10 million funding round from private investors, Xiotech also secured a new $10 million line of credit. Xiotech plans to use the cash to expand its Intelligent Storage Element technology with new products to be released early next year.

Xiotech previously secured an investment round of more than $40 million in November 2007, after acquiring Seagate's Advanced Storage Architecture division. The Seagate technology helped form the basis of Xiotech's ISE product line.

Xiotech says it has sold more than 1,500 ISE units since making the technology available a year ago. ISE is able to scale to one petabyte, incorporates self-healing processes to recover from most failures, and uses a management interface that automates storage operations across physical and virtual layers. While wasted disk space is a common problem in the storage industry, Xiotech claims to offer usable capacity of 100 percent.

Gaining new funding is a tough task in today's economy for storage vendors, with funding for network companies falling to lows not seen in more than a decade. Xiotech says the financing will help it build products that let customers "more easily increase storage capacity or storage management functionality without being locked into the closed storage systems sold by most large IT vendors today."

Xiotech may also be going through a change at the top. CEO Casey Powell is leaving after four years at the company and is being replaced by an executive from EMC, according to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  

But Powell is still listed as the CEO on the Xiotech website. A Xiotech spokesman said the company is not commenting on the report about its CEO situation.