{"id":11569,"date":"2014-10-06T23:53:37","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T23:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/news\/2014\/oct\/07\/solidfire-announces-new-funding-new-storage-nodes-no-plans-ipo\/"},"modified":"2014-10-06T23:53:37","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T23:53:37","slug":"solidfire-announces-new-funding-new-storage-nodes-but-no-plans-for-ipo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/solidfire-announces-new-funding-new-storage-nodes-but-no-plans-for-ipo\/","title":{"rendered":"SolidFire announces new funding, new storage nodes, but no plans for IPO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture credit: Bob Mical\/Flickr<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Flash storage provider SolidFire has beefed up its funding pool with a series D round of $82m, bringing its total up to $150m.<\/p>\n

The funding was led by Greenspring Associates, a new investor, along with current investors NEA, Novak Biddle, Samsung Ventures and Valhalla Partners. SolidFire says the new funds will be part of a global push and to advance its all-flash storage architecture.<\/p>\n

“Series D financing for SolidFire is important,” Jay Prassl, SolidFire VP marketing, told CloudTech<\/em>. “When you’re building an infrastructure company and a storage company like SolidFire, it’s a capital-intensive business.<\/p>\n

“This D round funding is very important because it puts SolidFire very much on a path to profitability,” he added. “We are growing a very long term standalone storage company, and raising these funds allows us to really set us up on a path to profitability and leave the options open, if you will, for SolidFire to continue to make additional moves as it goes forward.”<\/p>\n

Prassl added there was nothing set in stone regarding an IPO – indeed, reading the history books of what’s happened to storage companies in the past, he admits there’s no prize for going public too early.<\/p>\n

Citing Violin Memory as an example, Prassl said: “Going public is often just one step in the process of continuing to grow a company, and it’s a choice you make at a certain point in time. Many companies…have been forced to go public…SolidFire certainly does not want to be in that position.”<\/p>\n

SolidFire sees itself squarely at a key trend of big data architecture, offering storage based on flash memory, which is a more energy-efficient way of reading and digesting data. It’s evidently a popular idea, as the investment money keeps rolling in.<\/p>\n

The firm has announced the expansion of its SF Series product line with two new storage nodes, offering users a cheaper way to get on board with the product. The SF2405 and SF4805 nodes represent the third generation of SolidFire hardware, with the SF2405 a low-end product release and SF4805 doubling up on that.<\/p>\n

SolidFire says the SF2405 is aimed at IT departments and managers looking to take their first steps towards deploying a private cloud infrastructure, and IT as a service – but it doesn’t mean the company is taking its eye off the ball for its traditional large enterprise customer base.<\/p>\n

“It’s cut the entry price point for SolidFire storage systems in half,” Prassl said. “That’s significant because that opens up a broader array of customers to SolidFire’s capabilities that maybe weren’t accessible before.<\/p>\n

“Many people often think that a smaller storage node indicates your movement towards a smaller target customers, and that’s not the case here,” he added.<\/p>\n

Prassl added the keys to initiating a small cloud environment are consolidation, automation of infrastructure, and ability to scale – something SolidFire feels it can do particularly well.<\/p>\n

“So many flash companies out there today are focused on one thing: flash”, he said. “We’re a very different storage company. We use flash, for sure, but we go far beyond the media to deliver these three key areas.”<\/p>\n

As Prassl argued, this is one of the main reasons why Greenspring Associates took an interest in investing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Picture credit: Bob Mical\/Flickr
\nFlash storage provider SolidFire has beefed up its funding pool with a series D round of $82m, bringing its total up to $150m.
\nThe funding was led by Greenspring Associates, a new investor, along with current investors …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}