Storage Player PernixData Closes $35M Funding Round

Flash storage software developer PernixData Wednesday said it closed a new round of funding, bringing the company an additional $35 million with which to build sales and marketing efforts.

The new C-round of funding brings total funding in PernixData to $62 million and will be used to double the marketing and engineering teams and expand PernixData's international presence, said Jeff Aaron, vice president of marketing at the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

"We're not yet cash-flow-positive," Aaron told CRN. "But we're on the road to profitability. We expect this round will last us 18 months, but we'll probably need one more round."

[Related: Western Digital Leads $20M Funding For Cloud Storage Tech Firm Avere]

PernixData's software ties the flash storage and SSDs in multiple servers into a cluster to provide a high-performance storage tier for virtualized environments.

The software ties flash storage inside a server to storage capacity in a storage array, Aaron said.

"It's a 100 percent software solution installed in the hypervisor kernel," he said. "It works with any flash storage in a server, and with any storage vendor. Anywhere there's virtualized servers with shared storage, we fit."

PernixData gives customers a good alternative for improving their IT infrastructure performance without adding new equipment, said Steve Welch, CEO of Nascent Integrated Solutions, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based solution provider that partners with several storage startups.

"Customers are trying to find ways to not rip and replace their IT, but instead complement their existing infrastructures and manage them in an nondisruptive fashion," Welch told CRN.

The new round of funding shows that PernixData has strong backing, Welch said. "It gives me the feeling they will be here tomorrow to bring out the features and technology my customers will need," he said.

PernixData's sales all go through the company's 250 channel partners worldwide, about half of which are in North America, Aaron said.

The company's offerings currently work on VMware platforms and offerings that work with Microsoft Azure and KVM are slated for a future release, he said.

Investors in PernixData include a who's who of the IT industry, among them Seagate Chairman and CEO Steve Luczo, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, Microsoft Chairman of the Board John Thompson and Veritas Founder Mark Leslie.

PUBLISHED AUG. 20, 2014