Coho Data Raises $25 Million for Software-define Storage Architecture

Coho Data, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California with R&D in Vancouver (Canada) and Cambridge (UK), announced $25 million Series B funding to support its new storage architecture that combines flash arrays for performance, COTS server hardware for scale-out sizing, and SDN intelligence.

"Storage is the final battleground in the datacenter, with expensive, outdated monolithic storage vendors fending off the advances of dozens of storage startups. Nearly all of these new product offerings are simply packaging flash technology into similar architectures with limited scalability and narrow applicability,” explained Ramana Jonnala, CEO and Co-Founder of Coho Data. “The Coho Data team believes that building a fundamentally different cloud-inspired software stack based on our experience developing the Xen hypervisor for Amazon is what will change storage in private clouds. With our unique use of software-defined networking to eliminate bottlenecks that flash creates in traditional arrays, flash will finally be able to be used in an efficient way to add value for any application at any scale.”

The funding round was led by new investor, Ignition Partners, and included existing investor, Andreessen Horowitz. The company plans to use the money to accelerate its go-to-market efforts as the it prepares for general availability of Coho DataStream later this year.

Coho Data, which was founded by key contributors to the Xen ecosystem, is taking a software-defined approach that combines commodity hardware with software that’s tuned for the latest PCIe flash technologies. The company said its team leveraged the experience of building the virtualization layer that powers Amazon’s EC2.  The goal is an on-premise storage solution for data centers that delivers twice the price/performance of all-flash arrays. OpenFlow is used to embed storage intelligence in the network. A 2U Coho DataStream appliance provides Up to 180K IOPS and can be scaled linearly.

The Coho DataStream product line is currently installed in large enterprise private cloud environments and will be general available later this year.

http://www.cohodata.com/