FlashSoft secures $3 million in first round of funding to deliver flash virtualization software to enterprise IT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: FlashSoft Corp., the Flash Virtualization company, announced its Series A funding of $3 million, led by Thomvest Ventures, and the introduction of the first commercial offering of software to enable enterprise flash as a cost-effective, server-tier computing resource. The company’s product, called FlashSoft SE, is commercially available today and is already being used in business-critical production environments by several customers. FlashSoft SE is available for free evaluation through a 30-day “Try Before You Buy” program.

Flash technology has gained traction in enterprise computing due to its ability to reduce input/output (IO) latency, and to increase scalability and performance for databases, enterprise applications and virtualization environments. The analyst firm Objective Analysis has forecast that shipments of enterprise SSDs will grow to 4 million units by 2015, more than 50 times the number shipped in 2010.

Despite the performance advantages of flash SSD, two barriers have inhibited its adoption in the enterprise. First, when used as primary data storage, flash memory cannot easily integrate with and leverage the benefits of existing storage systems infrastructure. Secondly, storing all of an application’s data on server-attached flash memory remains expensive. FlashSoft overcomes both of these objections.

FlashSoft SE is the first commercially available, all-software “tier minus one” solution for Flash Virtualization. Enterprise IT can now provide databases, applications and virtual machine environments with the performance benefit of having the entire data set on flash, with only a fraction of the data actually stored in flash. This innovation makes enterprise flash a cost-effective performance solution that works seamlessly with existing storage infrastructure.

In fact, FlashSoft actually reduces the IO burden on storage, producing even greater cost savings. FlashSoft’s technology is designed to deliver flash-grade performance within a standalone server, across server clusters, and throughout the data center.