Coho Data Raises $30 Million in Series C

Coho Data, Inc., in web-scale flash storage for the enterprise, has closed $30 million in series C funding, bringing its total funding to nearly $67 million.

The round was led by March Capital Partners, with additional participation from Hewlett Packard Ventures and Intel Capital as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Ignition Partners.

Concurrently with this round of funding, Coho Data is announcing the availability of its first all-flash storage node, the DataStream 2000f.

Working with the existing hybrid 1000h and 800h DataStream nodes, the 2000f allows customers the flexibility to mix and match DataStream nodes to realize price/performance value for flash-optimized storage

“Coho’s scale-out storage technology allows our customers to achieve web-scale economics within their own data centers by purchasing exactly the storage performance and capacity that they need, as they need it,” said Ramana Jonnala, Coho Data CEO and co-founder. “This funding allows us to continue to grow into new markets and to invest in further broadening Coho’s product portfolio and capabilities.”

Coho Data is focused on delivering simple-to-use building blocks that enterprises, and companies of all sizes, can use to create data-centric infrastructure for fast, flexible scale-out solutions. Regardless of whether data is in a VM, file share or Hadoop cluster, Coho Data accelerates the applications currently used in large enterprise private cloud environments.

“Coho Data has taken the cost savings and operational simplicity attributed to public cloud storage systems and realized them as a packaged scale-on-demand storage appliance for private cloud environments,” said Sumant Mandal, March Capital. “We are delighted to support such a disruptive, innovative and passionate organization and look forward to seeing how Coho Data continues to redefine the architecture of efficient, high-performance datacenter infrastructure.”

Coho Data’s new all-flash 2000f DataStream packs up to 320,000 IO/s into each 2U chassis by combining Intel P3600 NVMe flash and conventional SSDs. This high performance node boasts IO/s-per-dollar ratio, and can be deployed on its own or incorporated into existing and deployed Coho DataStream storage clusters. Together, these all-flash and hybrid DataStream options empower customers to support any application at any scale, all from a single pane of glass management interface, and at less than $0.10/GB usable per month.

“The Coho DataStream all-flash 2000f system delivered excellent performance, achieving an IOmark-VM level of 960. These are the highest certified results of any system we’ve tested to date,” said Russ Fellows, Evaluator Group.

“Since deploying Coho Data’s solutions, we’ve calculated a 70% reduction in storage management time. In the past, nearly a third of our time was spent wrestling with the underlying storage,” lamented David Hekimian, CEO and co-founder, Tech Accelerator. “With Coho Data, performance out of the box was infinitely better than my existing arrays. For the first 30 days, we only logged in the management UI twice. We didn’t need to touch it because it just worked.”

Coho Data also announced its Future-Proof Storage Guarantee, which protects a customer’s investment in storage hardware by including new software features free of charge for hardware under a support contract. This enables customers to benefit from new protocols, functionality, and performance improvements on their existing investment even as they grow and reconfigure their clusters with new capacity – or performance – oriented DataStreams over time.

Mahesh Neelankanta, director of technical services group, Florida Atlantic University, explained, “We need flash storage to meet the high performance needs of our demanding faculty, students and staff in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Our goal was to find a solution that could address our challenging VDI use case today, but could also grow with our research and academic needs without a big investment upfront. This flexibility to add all-flash, hybrid or even high-capacity nodes to our cluster later down the line without any disruption is what separates the Coho DataStream 2000f from other options out there. In addition, when compared to our existing enterprise storage systems, our Coho DataStream is far easier to set up, maintain and manage, and having a single global namespace rather than multiple block storage addresses reduces possible provisioning errors across our VDI server cluster and completely removes any need to manually grow volumes after provisioning.”

Coho Data id headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in Canada, the UK and India.

More about Coho Data’s 2000f