WD Invested in All-SSD System Start-Up Skyera

Skyera Inc. and Western Digital Corp. announced that Skyera has received strategic funding from Western Digital Capital as part of its recently announced Series B round of financing.

Western Digital Capital co-invested in the $51 million round as an extension of the strategic relationship between the two companies that also includes joint technology development. It had previously funded Skyera as its initial outside investor.

"The backing of Western Digital has enabled us to ramp our business across marketing, sales and engineering which has been instrumental in creating the industry’s most innovative solid-state solution," said Radoslav Danilak, CEO of Skyera. "With our skyHawk family of enterprise solid-state storage systems we are witnessing the next era of solid-state storage and I strongly believe that having a close working relationship with Western Digital, the world’s top disk drive vendor, is invaluable as we set out to reshape the storage landscape."

"One of our primary goals in developing strategic relationships with technology innovators in the broader storage ecosystem is to enable customers to develop highly optimized storage solutions that meet their changing data management needs," said Steve Milligan, president and CEO, Western Digital. "We see companies like Skyera as offering a dramatic improvement over traditional approaches to emerging storage challenges. We will continue to support innovation by collaborating with customers and partners, and investing in companies who are addressing today’s most exciting storage opportunities."

Skyera’s skyHawk series of enterprise solid-state storage systems, priced at less than $3 per gigabyte, mark the first time that the latest generation 19/20nm solid-state technology can be used as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise HDD-based systems.

Skyera’s skyHawk solid-state solution has received industry acclaim as a visionary and innovative product, substantiating its approach to mainstream enterprise solid-state storage. Its SEOS solid-state OS combines hardware, storage and data management into a unified solution that provides performance, cost and power consumption attributes.

Comments

Does WD believe that its core business, the manufacturing of HDDs, does not have a bright future and consequently is searching to invest into activities having more future?

The first sign of this new strategy of CEO Steve Milligan - former CEO John Coyne focused on HDD only - was the acquisition of SiliconSystems in SSDs competing with HDDs, in 2009, and more recently Arkeia in backup software for SMBs, at the beginning of this year.

All the other significant acquisitions of WD since 2003 were directly in relation with its HDD business (Komag in disk media in 2007, Hoya Magnetic Media Operations in sputtering operations in 2010, and HDD competitor HGST in 2010.)

Skyera is among the start-ups in all-SSD storage subsystems. Putting some money into this young firm is a way to get a customer for WD's own SSDs and maybe also a way for the HDD maker to put a foot in the fast growing sector of solid-state storage systems. But note that another huge investor into Skyera is Dell, being one of the last storage giant that does not offer currently any all-SSD storage subsystems.

On its side, WD's competitor Seagate enlarged its portfolio with backup solutions from EVault, with external storage systems following the acquisition of LaCie, and invested in DensBits Technologies in flash technology and Virident in PCIe SSDs.