SoftIron Raises $34 Million in Series B Funding

SoftIron Ltd., in purpose-built and performance-optimized data center appliances, secured $34 million in series B equity funding from its existing investors.

It will use the funding to expand its presence across North America, Europe, and the APAC region with planned growth in sales, product marketing, and support. In addition, the funding will strengthen engineering initiatives to build its portfolio of data center appliances based on open source software solutions.

SoftIron creates task-specific appliances for scale-out data center solutions, delivering industry-leading performance across metrics including density, efficiency, capacity, speed and heat emission. Its hardware is designed, developed and assembled in California and is purpose-built to optimize the performance of best-in-class open-source software for today’s hyper-scale and SMB data centers.

Co-founders Phil Straw, Mark Chen and Norman Fraser set out to disrupt the storage sector and challenge legacy storage vendor solutions with their HyperDrive SDS portfolio, which was custom built to deliver Ceph performance. The company has since expanded its offering to address the full spectrum of data center requirements, recently with the addition of HyperSwitch, a next-gen top-of-rack switch built to maximize the performance and flexibility of SONC. Because the firm has end-to-end ownership of the design and manufacturing process, it is a vendor able to claim auditable provenance on its products, meaning 100% transparency on the integrity of its hardware and software.

“What’s most exciting for us is the realisation of our original vision holistically to address the needs of every aspect of today’s data center,” said Phil Straw, CEO. “We had nothing to lose when we started out, so we did the unthinkable and built our appliances from scratch to address what we saw as the new normal: a flexible, adaptable, open-source based, software-defined data center. I’m proud to say we are now well on our way to being a full spectrum computer company. We are no longer just building a storage appliance; we are offering a coherent end-to-end solution that I believe will revolutionize the enterprise data center. Coupled with our auditable hardware and “Secure Provenance” promise, we are well-positioned to take our business to the next level.”

“We’ve spent the last few years flying under the radar, honing our vision and working hard to deliver it through genuine, cutting-edge technological wins,” said Harry Richardson, chief scientist. “Now to be able to bring the result to market at scale is a tremendous validation for the team and for our vision to deliver purpose-built hardware that maximizes the flexibility and power of open-source software-defined solutions. We’ve got some truly great things in store for organizations looking to leverage open source and transition their mission-critical computing away from proprietary vendor lock-in.“

Recently, SoftIron announced HyperSwitch, a line of top-of-rack network switches built to maximize the performance and flexibility of SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud), an open-source network OS developed by Microsoft for scale-out performance networking. 

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September 12, 2017 | Press Release