4Blox Secures Funding to Fuel Development of ISCSI Acceleration Software
Company Adds Key Industry Leaders to Board of Directors and Advisory Board
SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 11, 2007 – 4Blox™ Inc., dedicated to improving iSCSI SAN
performance, today announced that it has secured a round of private equity funding led by
Flywheel Ventures and appointed new board of directors and advisory members. The company
will use the funding to drive sales and marketing efforts and to further product development.
To drive the company’s momentum in the market, it appointed industry veteran George Symons
to its board of directors and Mickey McIntire to its advisory board.
“Our investment in 4Blox represents our belief in the growth of iSCSI as a transformational
storage technology,” said Scott Caruso, general partner with Flywheel Ventures. “4Blox has
developed a unique software-based approach to performance that sets it apart from current
hardware-based iSCSI offload and acceleration products.”
4Blox is a start-up venture that develops software products that lower the host CPU
communications overhead associated with iSCSI-based storage area networks. The most
important hardware resource for efficiently handling increased load in iSCSI processing is CPU
capacity. iSCSI-based SANs experience severe system performance degradation when used on
virtualized servers, with large numbers of users or with bandwidth intensive applications – like
backup and video. The core product from 4Blox is a set of software components used to expand
CPU processing capacity in iSCSI SANs.
“We are seeing wide and growing adoption of iSCSI as a cost effective storage networking
technology that works with standard Ethernet,” said Brian Garrett an industry analyst with the
Enterprise Strategy Group. “Combined with the explosive growth of server virtualization and
growing interest in 10 GigE, ESG believes that 4Blox’s unique approached to iSCSI CPU
optimization is poised for a great ride on a rising wave of networked storage adoption.”
New Leadership Team
Board members Scott Caruso and 4Blox CEO Dan Munro will be joined by industry veteran and
current Yosemite Technologies CEO George Symons. Yosemite Technologies provides small-tomedium
size businesses with applications designed to simplify the way they protect and manage
their data. Mr. Symons joined Yosemite from EMC, where he served as CTO for Information
Management, responsible for defining EMC’s product and technical strategy.
The company also named former String Bean Software CEO, Mickey McIntire to its advisory
board. String Bean Software was the developer of WinTarget, a software-only iSCSI target
acquired by Microsoft Corporation in March 2006.
About 4Blox
4Blox, Inc., is the first software company dedicated to improving iSCSI SAN performance. The
company’s family of software-based accelerators reduce the host CPU processing overhead
associated with iSCSI. As a result, businesses enable higher connection loads and the ability to
take advantage of higher network line speeds like 10GbE. For more information on 4Blox please
visit www.4Blox.com.
About Flywheel Ventures
Flywheel Ventures is a venture capital firm that makes investments of first institutional capital in
the Mountain West. Flywheel targets companies based on innovations in information technology
and the physical sciences. The firm matches talented entrepreneurs and market opportunities with
Flywheel’s capital, entrepreneurial experience, and industry relationships to accelerate
innovations into profitable companies. Flywheel is based in Santa Fe and also has offices in
Albuquerque and San Francisco. For more information on Flywheel, please visit
www.flywheelventures.com.
Contact: Donna Michaels
Loughlin/Michaels Group
408-393-5575
email: donna@lmgpr.com
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