Pivot3, a virtual distributed RAID vendor, will use $24 million it raised in additional venture capital funding to expand marketing, sales and support to channel partners selling its RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet, or RAIGE, technology.

Vice president of Marketing Jeff Bell said the additional funding also will help extend the technology's reach into other storage-intensive verticals such as financial services and health care. Pivot3 RAIGE is currently used by several city and local governments to store video surveillance files and also has been embraced by casino customers, Bell said.

"We want to extend the base technology to other markets beyond video surveillance; we understand that is an application niche," Bell said.  The company currently has about six resellers and plans to expand that number to more than 20 by the end of 2008, Bell said.

The funding will allow Pivot3 to provide sales and marketing support to more partners as well as aid in recruiting partners nationwide. 

RAIGE technology is a networked version of traditional RAID storage, Bell said.  Storage nodes are managed not through a traditional controller, said Bell, but through a state-of-the-art architecture that allows servers to access data in parallel across multiple nodes at once. Removing the need for a storage controller removed not only a cost concern, but a performance inhibitor, Bell said. 

"RAIGE coordinates data access without the need for front-end controllers," Bell said.  While not every customer needs that kind of access, Bell said VARs and customers find that replacing storage controllers that are too small and have become "bottlenecks" is costly and inefficient. "There are ways to architect systems with faster controllers, but [the controllers] need to be bigger, which could result in a customer having to rip and replace," Bell said.  The Pivot3 system allows for additional nodes instead, which is much cheaper and easier for customers, he said.

"RAIGE is great for applications that are data-intensive and require constant access to data that's constantly changing and flooding the system," Bell said, like the $7 billion video surveillance market, where Pivot3 partners have found a lucrative market for the vendor's products.