First edition of the 2014 of the Startup News Flash. I expect this year to be full of announcements, new rounds of funding, new products, new features and new companies. There are various startups planning to come out of stealth this year and all play in the storage / flash space, so make sure to follow this series!
On Tuesday the 14th of January Nutanix announced a new round of funding. Series D financing is co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures, and the total amount is $101 million. The company has now raised a total of $172.2 million in four rounds of funding and has been valuated close to $ 1 billion. Yes, that is huge. Probably one of the most successful startups of the last couple of years. Congrats to everyone involved!
Tintri announced a rather aggressive program. The Register reported it here, and it is all about replacing NetApp systems with Tintri systems. In short: “The “Virtualize More with 50% Less” Program offers 50% storage capacity and rack space savings versus currently installed NetApp FAS storage to support deployed virtualization workloads”. I guess it is clear what kind of customers they are going after and who their primary competition is. Of course there is a list of requirements and constraints which the Register already outlined nicely. If you are looking to replace your current NetApp storage infrastructure I guess this could be a nice offer, or a nice way to get more discount.. Either way, you win.
SSD and PCIe flash devices are king these days, but SanDisk is looking to change that with the announcement of the availability of the ULLtraDIMM. The ULLtraDIMM is a combination of Diablo’s DDR3 tranlation protocol and SanDisk’s flash and controllers on top of a nice DIMM. Indeed, it doesn’t get closer to your CPU then straight on your memory bus. By the looks of it IBM is one of the first vendors to offer it, as they recently announced that the eXFlash DIMM is an option for its System x3850 and x3950 X6 servers providing up to 12.8TB of flash capacity2. Early benchmarks showed write latency around 5-10 microsecond! I bet half the blogosphere just raised their hands to give this a go in their labs!