Virtualization Track at Cloud Expo

Pivot3, the start-up that claims to be the first company to deliver virtual servers and scalable storage in a single platform, has raised a $25 million D round led by Focus Ventures, which has backed other storage companies like Isilon, which IPO'd for $1.4 billion, and EqualLogic, which sold to Dell.

Existing investors InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial Capital Partners IX and Silver Creek Ventures also kicked in.

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The $25 mil, these days a generous infusion, makes $75 million to date. Company co-founder and chief marketing officer Lee Caswell, the ex-VMware guy, says this will be Pivot's last round. The company will be profitable this year.

The new money is earmarked for sales expansion outside the Americas and the creation of new markets for Pivot's so-called Serverless Computing platform.

Pivot adopted a form of guerilla marketing to quietly build up a user base in video surveillance before trying to hurdle into the mainstream. It's adding features and organizing a beta test that'll run through the end of summer to isolate the most likely of the, say, five trial verticals to be beguiled by its widgetry.

Pivot3's Serverless Computing is a large-scale scale-out high-bandwidth iSCSI storage solution with integrated server virtualization that consolidates physical servers into IP SAN storage appliances for high availability of storage and applications and simple capacity scaling, with a commodity hardware cost basis. It also saves power, cooling and rackspace.

Pivot3 is adding what it calls RAID 6x, allowing for five drive failures; moving to the quad-core Nehalem, which'll give it eight cores per appliance to support RAID 6x and four guests; and clustered Flash as a latency-fighting cache mechanism that gets first dibs on the data before it's distributed.

The company says 12 of its appliances can be strung together as a so-called Raige array. The free virtual server inside can access the shared capacity and performance of the SAN.

The seven-year-old company currently claims 140 customers including the port of Seattle, the Mall of America, and the city of Trenton. The largest installation at the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is a regulated installation with 4PB of SAN storage that simultaneously provides more than 200 virtual servers. It's for gaming.

Street price runs a dollar a GB with a free server in every box. Pivot3 has been growing 100% a year, according to Caswell.