Pliant Technology Raises $15 Million

Pliant Technology, developer of Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of high-performance solid state storage devices for the enterprise, has received $15 million in Series C funding. Pliant’s EFDs are designed to deliver dramatically higher levels of I/O performance while meeting the growing need for increased energy efficiency and reliability in enterprise computing environments.

Pliant plans to use the Series C funding as working capital to support the volume production ramp-up of its first EFD solutions. The company will also leverage the funding to begin expanding its EFD product portfolio. Pliant began delivery of initial EFD units to major OEMs in late 2008.

Pliant’s Series C funding round includes the addition of Menlo Ventures, one of the world’s largest VC firms focusing on the information technology sector, and managing director Mark A. Siegel has joined Pliant’s board of directors.

“Pliant has generated substantial interest among the industry’s top system and storage server OEMs,” said Siegel. “The ability of Pliant’s leadership team to raise this amount of funding underscores the tremendous value its advanced EFD technology can offer enterprise data centers, including dramatic I/O performance gains, as well as significant reductions in energy consumption and IT costs.”

Other leading VC firms investing in the Series C round, as well as in previous rounds, include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Arcturus Capital, and Divergent Ventures.

“We are delighted to have Menlo Ventures join the group of leading investors that continue to support our efforts to bring the first EFDs to market,” said Amyl Ahola, CEO of Pliant Technology. “We continue to meet all key product and company milestones, and we are well on track to begin volume production of our first EFDs.”

“Solid state storage technologies will have a significant impact in data centers over the next two to three years, particularly when it comes to meeting ever-increasing I/O performance requirements,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Wherever users need additional speed or extreme throughput performance – such as for database acceleration, Web services or finance operations – solid state is becoming a perfect choice. But not all solid state is born equal – Pliant’s implementation has been developed to deliver ultra-high I/O performance, as well as to further mitigate the reliability and cost question-marks that have been restricting the adoption rate of SSDs into the enterprise. As such, its innovation positions Pliant to be a significant contributor to driving the mainstream enterprise adoption of flash storage.”

Pliant’s EFD solution provides more performance and lower energy consumption than multiple traditional high-performance hard drives for enterprise computing environments, and is designed to take advantage of the ultra-high data transfer capabilities of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface technology. Strategically deploying EFDs within enterprise IT data center environments enables IT managers to meet I/O performance requirements with greater flexibility, while eliminating the energy and cost burden resulting from the common practice of ‘over-provisioning’ disk drives. The EFD approach can slash data center energy consumption significantly, by up to 80 percent in many cases, and Pliant’s EFDs fit seamlessly into the existing storage infrastructure.