Pune-based data centre technology startup Arkin Net has raised $15 million (Rs 95 crore) from venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners. Serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist B.V Jagadeesh also participated in this second round of funding along with other strategic investors.
Founded by IIT-Kanpur alumni Shiv Agarwal, Mukul Gupta, Rohit Toshniwal and IIT-Bombay graduate Abhijit Sharma in 2013, Arkin will use the funds to hire talent and scale up its operations. The firm also announced the availability of their platform and cloud service, that brings Google-search like simplicity to the software-defined data centres. Arkin said the platform enables organizations to search, analyze, share and collaborate across virtual and physical layers of their infrastructure.
“Arkin is unlocking the true potential of software-defined data centres. This was largely unknown to the siloed world of IT operations,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus. “We are thrilled to have partnered with the Arkin team right from inception.”
A software-defined data centre is a data storage facility in which all elements of the infrastructure like storage, networking, central processing unit and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service.
“The Arkin platform ties together the data centre silos across virtual and physical,” said Shiv Agarwal, chief executive of Arkin. “Some of the largest enterprises have deployed Arkin to simplify their operations and unlock significant cost savings and agility.”
The two-year-old startup has attracted top industry executives as part of advisory board. Some of them include Alan Cohen, chief commercial officer at cybersecurity firm Illumio, Dheeraj Pandey, founder of tech firm Nutanix and Denis Murphy, a vice president at Nimble Storage.
“We believe network virtualisation will bring about radical improvements in network operations,” said Martin Casado, a senior vice president at tech company VMware-- a partner of Arkin.
