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Boston Investor Bolsters Storage Space Investments

Boston-based JT Venture Partners is planning to increase its investments in the storage space this year and is considering placing bets in up to four companies this year compared to the three it made last year. Shaji John, managing partner, explained that demand for storage has grown at exponential rates over the last few years and is expected to continue at those rates. Moreover, storage architectures deployed in the market today were not designed to scale in tandem with the high rates of server devices and storage resources growth. John noted that storage is the bottleneck in the system today because, while tremendous innovations have developed in microprocessor and networking design, current storage technology has remained as it was 15 years ago.

JT Ventures will look at new storage architectures that scale on demand and bring down the total cost of ownership for the enterprise. These areas include virtualization, global/distributed file systems and technologies that converge at storage area networks and network-attached storage. John noted that the wholesale cost of one megabyte of storage hardware is $0.01, but the total cost of ownership for an enterprise to manage one megabyte is $12 per year. “A lot of research and development has to go to the storage area to bring the differential down. This brings in demand for innovations in storage management and new storage architecture that will bring down the total cost of ownership for the enterprise,” he said. The firm manages $100 million in committed capital and also focuses on the telecom/networking infrastructure and software space. It invests in early- to mid-stage companies and places $2-5 million per investment.