元器件交易网讯 5月8日消息，据外媒报道，英特尔投资（Intel Capital）主导2500万美元Maxta公司投资案，希望Maxta将软件调整到英特尔平台。

　　Maxta于去年成立，已经开发了供商用服务器除处理其他任务之外存储空间的软件，从而减少专用存储列阵需求和EMC、NetApp这样大型存储厂商压力。

　　“我关注数据中心和云服务基础设施，这一领域将有重大转变发生，”英特尔投资常务理事布莱恩·沃尔夫（Bryan Wolf）表示关注英特尔在计算机、网络和存储公司之间的互补投资。

　　沃尔夫拒绝对Maxta投资细节发表评论。（元器件交易网毛毛  摘译）

　　以下为原文：

　　Intel Invests in Maxta to GetSoftware-Defined Storage on Intel Platform

　　Intel Capital co-led a $25 millioninvestment in Maxta Inc., as the chip giant continues to look for innovativecompanies that can tailor their software to the Intel platform.

　　Maxta, which launched last year, hasdeveloped software that lets commodity servers handle storage in addition totheir other tasks, eliminating the need for specialized storage arrays andputting pressure on large storage vendors such as EMC Corp. and NetApp Inc.

　　The company hopes to do for storage what VMwareInc. in the 1990s did for computing. VMware lets multiple operating systems andapplications share space across multiple servers and data centers by usingvirtual machines, and Maxta applies this concept to storage, running itssoftware on the server alongside the virtual machine and eliminating the needto translate between the server and a storage array—since the software replacesthe array.

　　“I’m focused on the data center and cloud infrastructure and there’sa big transformation happening,” said Intel Capital Managing Director BryanWolf, who said to watch for complementary investments from Intel in compute,networking and storage companies.

　　Although Wolf declined to comment on thedetails of the Maxta investment, it has some similarities to Intel’s $750million investment in Cloudera Inc. in March for the Big Data analysis softwareHadoop.

　　As it did with Cloudera, Intel hasdedicated people to work with Maxta, according to Maxta Founder and ChiefExecutive Yoram Novick, and the companies’ agreement spans everything fromdevelopment to marketing to joint sales. Although the money comes from IntelCapital, other divisions of Intel, including the storage division, will beinvolved.

　　The relationship developed over nearly twoyears as the companies got to know each other. Intel is central to what Maxtadoes, Novick said, and Intel came to agree.

　　“In the long term, Intel will develop new features in its futurearchitecture for software-defined-networked storage…and Maxta will developsoftware to leverage all those features,” Novick said. “…No single large servervendor doesn’t use Intel, especially for the modern data center.”

　　Maxta launched in November with $10 millionin Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Tenaya Capital co-led the newSeries B round with Intel, and Andreessen Horowitz participated.

　　Although he hadn’t intended to raise moneyso soon, Novick said, Maxta is growing faster than he anticipated. The companyhas acquired paying customers in food and retail, for instance, which are notconsidered early adopters in technology, in addition to the usual early-adoptertech and financial services customers. Maxta is also being used by cloudproviders for storage in their own data centers.

　　“The pain is really large,” Novick said. “Storage didn’t keep up withvirtualization software, and as any organization keeps growing the amount ofdata [without] the same increase in the number of people to manage it, it needstechnology.”

　　As part of the funding, Tenaya ManagingDirector Brian Paul joins Maxta’s board, with Intel as a board observer.Maxta’s valuation was not disclosed.

　　(The Journal’s sister publication, VentureCapital Dispatch, was first to publish news of this investment).