Kazan Networks Closed $4.5 Million Series A Round

Kazan Networks Corporation has closed a $4.5 million series A funding round led by Samsung Ventures, with participation from Intel Capital and Western Digital Corporation.

“Raising money these days is not trivial, yet we ended up with an over-subscribed round, which I think speaks to the strength of both the team and our product direction,” said Joe Steinmetz, CEO, Kazan. “This round sets us up nicely to continue to grow the team and execute our roadmap through 2016 and beyond.”

As the SSDs used in datacenter storage have leapt forward in speed and capacity, cloud service providers need faster interfaces for moving data between the storage media and the network. Kazan has developed a sub-μs latency solution of NVMe over Fabrics, demonstrated at Intel Developer Forum in 2015, which connects high performance storage to racks of servers in the datacenter. The company’s Ethernet-based technology delivers lower latency than competing solutions, and is a solution to implement both varieties of RDMA acceleration over Ethernet. Simultaneous RoCE and iWARP support means customers need not worry about choosing one protocol over the other.

“Kazan Networks is developing products that are enabling the overall NVMe over Fabrics ecosystem, and we are happy to participate in their series A round,” said Jay Chong, VP, Samsung Ventures.

“NVMe over Fabrics is a key enabler to support attaching thousands of NVMe SSDs in modern rack-scale designs,” said Amber Huffman, Intel fellow in the non-volatile memory solutions group at Intel Corporation and chair of NVME Express Workgroup. “Kazan has been a leader in the standards definition, and their products enable the ecosystem to connect storage to the fabrics in an integrated manner.”

“We are pleased to have participated in Kazan’s Series A financing round and look forward to helping the company further develop its NVMe over Fabrics solution,” said Mark Long, president, Western Digital Capital. “Western Digital strongly supports products and technologies designed to improve the performance of existing storage network applications, particularly those which will help data center customers unlock the full performance advantages of flash storage.”

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