New Storage Startup, Pliant Technology, Into Enterprise Flash SSD

Pliant Technology today announced that it has received $8 million in
Series A funding to drive the development of a new class of solid state
drive (SSD) storage devices for enterprise computing markets.  Pliant’s
new Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) devices are being designed to deliver
dramatically higher levels of performance while meeting the growing
need for increased energy efficiency and reliability in enterprise
computing environments.

The Series A funding was led
by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a leading venture capital firm based in
Menlo Park, Calif., that focuses on early-stage IT- and energy-related
investments.

Pliant Technology was formed by
several of the foremost experts and innovators in the data storage
industry. The Pliant executive team, which collectively has more than
100 years of storage industry experience developing new technologies,
bringing products to market, rapidly capturing dominant market share,
and providing significant returns to investors, includes the following
key individuals:

• Jim McCoy, Chairman – Co-Founder of Maxtor and Quantum
• Amyl Ahola, CEO – Former CEO of TeraStor, vice president at Seagate and Control Data
• Mike Chenery, President/Founder – Former vice president of advanced product engineering at Fujitsu
• Doug Prins, Founder/Chief Architect – Former consultant for Fujitsu, Emulex, and Q-Logic
• Aaron Olbrich, Founder/CTO – Formerly at Fujitsu and IBM

Today, high-performance enterprise IT computing systems are
increasingly constrained by the limits of traditional hard drive
technology that can provide only incremental improvements in
transactional performance.  As a result, many IT managers have had to
increase I/O performance by over provisioning hard drives resulting in significantly
higher cost, power consumption and failure rates.  At the same time,
current attempts to improve performance using solid state storage
solutions are falling short of enterprise system needs, delivering only
marginal performance improvements in little more than re-packaged
consumer Flash solid state storage. 

“Pliant’s
innovative vision and technology approach is possible because of the
extensive collective experience of a team with an unmatched track
record of success in the storage industry,” said Amyl Ahola, CEO Pliant
Technology.  “We are well on track to deliver the industry’s first
truly innovative EFD solution later this year – a device that will
deliver unequaled enterprise performance and reliability while at the
same time enabling significant cost saving and power reductions
compared to  today’s best performing hard drives.  We believe that
these exponential performance and efficiency gains will allow
organizations to dramatically expand the capabilities of their systems
in new and innovative ways.”  

According to
Barry Eggers, General Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, the lead
investor in the Series A funding round, Pliant’s new approach to SSD
storage technology well-exceeds the performance of existing solutions.

“Rotating
disk drives, one of the last bastions of moving parts in the data
center, will start to feel the heat as flash based storage solutions
reach new levels of performance and reliability for the enterprise,”
said Eggers. “Flash-based storage offers better performance, higher
storage densities and lower power requirements.  However, existing SSD
solutions have largely been relegated to niche applications. Pliant’s
EFD solution offers the level of performance and efficiency gains that
we believe will help propel flash storage technology into the
enterprise mainstream.” 

Pliant’s EFD storage
solution is based on a new and advanced controller design and software
architecture, and will integrate seamlessly into existing enterprise
information systems.  Delivering exponential improvements over today’s
highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of
data I/O intensive enterprise applications, Pliant’s solution is
expected to be available to OEM and data center customers in the fourth
quarter of 2008. 

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Pliant Technology