Storage maker Intransa lands $15m in funding

SAN JOSE, Calif.--IP storage maker Intransa, based here, announced in October $15 million in new funding. This most recent round was led by Rho ventures, who placed partner Paul Bartlett on the Intransa board of directors. Rho joins other Intransa investors Entrepia Ventures, Guggenheim Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures and US Venture Partners. The new funding is intended to accelerate sales, marketing and research and development efforts, said CEO Bud Broomhead. For example, he said, the company has recently added to its portfolio of patents, which “allows us to increase the throughput of camera streams to storage. We’ve already filed one patent on that and there are several others in the works.” He said much of the R&D now is focused on the user experience, optimizing the storage, and moving data from a remote location to a central video repository. The marketing effort is actually more difficult, in some ways, than the technology development, however. The CCTV market is mature, said Broomhead, and so is the storage technology Intransa brings, but the two markets need to meet in the middle somewhere. Broomhead said the video marketplace needs to “wake up to the fact that storage can be strategic. It’s shouldn’t be an afterthought. A lot of people start at the camera and move back, and if they thought about storage up front they could reduce cost, have a more effective and efficient design, and not paint themselves into corners, which they’ve been doing for the past 15 years.” Intransa’s technology is iSCSI-based, for example, and helps companies migrate from DVRs to NVRs and beyond, Broomhead said. “We bring scalable external storage to the CCTV industry,” he said. You “hook this up to your existing DVRs and use it to address your retention, resolution, and frame-rate issues of your existing infrastructure. And the technology that we’re using as the connector is an IT technology, and it’s the same IT technology that will be used when you start putting in IP-based NVRs. So putting in our storage is a solution to the issue of your current infrastructure, and at the same time it’s a foundation for the IP-based NVRs in the future. It’s not a throwaway, it’s an investment.”