Western Digital Co-Invests Another $51 Million in Skyera Solid State Storage Expertise

Western Digital and Skyera have announced that Skyera is receiving strategic funding from Western Digital as  part of its recently announced Series B round of financing.  Western Digital had previously funded Skyera as the initial outside investor, and has now co-invested to the tune of an additional $51 million as an extension of the strategic relationship.  The relationship between the two companies also includes joint technology development.

According to Radoslav Danilak, chief executive officer of  Skyera, “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.  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.”

Steve Milligan, President and CEO of Western Digital, states: “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.  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.”

The skyHawk series of enterprise-level solid-state storage systems from Skyera are priced at an industry breakthrough point of less than $3 per gigabyte; and mark the first time that the latest 19/20nm architecture of solid-state drives can be used as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise-level hard disk-based systems.  Skyera’s skyHawk solution has been heralded by the industry as a visionary and innovative product, thus sustaining Skyera’s strategy for mainstream enterprise-level solid-state storage.  Its SEOS solid-state operating system creates a unified solution that combines hardware, storage and data management.  This unified solution provides top-level performance; and lower cost and lower power consumption attributes.

Western Digital’s press release can be viewed in its entirety here; and Sykera’s press release here.