Tag: server side flash

PernixData Closes $35M In Series C Funding For Its Disruptive Server Side Storage Technology

On Wednesday, PernixData announced the finalization of $35M in Series C funding in a round led by Menlo Ventures. The Series C funding raise also included the participation of individual investors in the form of Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, Jim Davidson, Managing Director at Silver Lake and Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate Technology. PernixData’s revolutionary server-side flash storage technology allows customers to scale their storage infrastructure without adding hardware-based storage capacity. PernixData FVP delivers software-based scale-out storage capability based on the aggregation of RAM or flash for any virtualized application. PernixData’s disruptive scale-out technology enables IT administrators to decouple storage capacity from its underlying hardware infrastructure toward the end of scaling storage capacity without intrusive additions to storage hardware.

The announcement of PernixData’s Series C funding comes hot on the heels of the company’s July 31 news of quarter over quarter revenue growth of 42% in its first full fiscal year. To date, PernixData claims over 200 paying customers for its FVP product in more than 20 countries. With an extra $35M in the bank, PernixData lies poised to consolidate its impressive early traction in the use of serve side flash to improve storage scalability and performance. Expect PernixData to continue leading the revolution in the decoupling of storage capacity from hardware-based storage capacity as its flagship FVP product expands its market penetration and continues its maturation in collaboration with customer feedback. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Lightspeed Ventures, Lane Bess, Mark Leslie and John Thompson also participated in today’s Series C round, which brings the total capital raised by PernixData to $62M.

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PernixData Releases PernixData FVP For SMBs; Selected As Finalist In “Best Technology” VMware 2013 Awards

PernixData continues to build on its momentum in the server side flash virtualization space. On Tuesday, the company announced a brand of its PernixData FVP software catered for small to medium-sized businesses. The SMB PernixData FVP creates a clustered acceleration tier for the virtualization of server side flash on up to four hosts, allowing for scale-out storage independent of hardware storage capacity. SMBs can now take advantage of PernixData’s disruptive technology that seamlessly installs into an organization’s existing IT infrastructure. The SMB edition of the PernixData FVP means that the company is now aggressively pursuing the enterprise, SMB and startup market in a strategy that appears intent on determining which vertical will deliver most sustained traction subsequent to its general availability announcement in early August.

Meanwhile, at VMware 2013, PernixData FVP was named one of the finalists in the “New Technology” category of the Best of VMware 2013 Awards. PernixData’s VP of Marketing, Jeff Aaron, commented on the VMware award by explaining the platform’s innovation as follows: “While other vendors offer point products that deliver modest storage performance gains for a limited number of use cases, PernixData FVP provides a true clustered solution that seamlessly benefits all virtualized applications. This makes PernixData’s software a key infrastructure element of any virtualized data center.” PernixData FVP installs into the hypervisor kernel within 20 minutes, without the necessity of VM or server changes or reboots.

PernixData Launches Software Solution To Virtualize Server Side Flash

Today, PernixData announces the availability of PernixData FVP, the industry’s first hypervisor for server side flash. PernixData FVP virtualizes and aggregates server side flash to enable dramatic improvements in scale-out storage capability. Based on a software solution, PernixData’s revolutionary technology enables dramatic improvements in scale-out storage without transformation of the storage infrastructure. PernixData’s virtualization of server side flash delivers enhanced read and write storage performance by means of a “clustered acceleration tier” that conglomerates server side flash to enable improvements in scale-out storage and performance. The solution currently supports VMware-based virtualization and plans to accommodate additional hypervisors in subsequent releases.

Chad Currier, IT director at Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Solutions, summarized the innovation of the product’s software-based storage solution as follows:

Storage I/O bottlenecks are consistently the root cause of many of our application performance issues. In the past, our only recourse was to add additional storage capacity, which is a costly and time-consuming endeavor that does not always solve the underlying performance problem. With scale-out storage performance, PernixData enables us to finally stop throwing hardware at our storage performance problems.

Currier notes how PernixData’s server side flash hypervisor allows customers to take advantage of software solutions to the problem of increasing scale-out storage instead of costly and cumbersome hardware-based approaches. PernixData FVP aggregates server side flash across a networked infrastructure as illustrated by the graphic below:

In an interview with Cloud Computing Today, CEO Poojan Kumar and VP of Marketing Jeff Aaron noted how the solution runs across a network of host virtual machines such that, “if every host in the cluster has a flash device, then the I/O for the VM will be accelerated with either the local flash device or (if the data is on another host) with a network access to the other host’s flash device.” The solution reduces application latency and allows for dramatic improvements in scale-out storage performance that are independent of storage capacity. To date, PernixData has raised $27 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Venture Partners and was co-founded by VMware veterans CEO Poojan Kumar and CTO Satyam Vaghani.