Fusion-io, the fast-growing maker of flash memory accelerator cards for data centers, has named former HP chief strategy and technology officer as its new CEO.

Robison replaces longtime CEO David Flynn, who, along with co-founder and chief marketing Rick White, is resigning to pursue entrepreneurial investing activities. Both Flynn and White will remain on the board and serve as advisors for the next year.

Robison, 59, has more than 30 years of experience in senior business management and product development roles. He has worked at AT&T Labs, Cadence Design Systems, Apple, Compaq, and HP. He was most recently executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer of HP from May 2002 to November 2011. Robison was sometimes mentioned as a candidate to be CEO, but he left shortly after Meg Whitman was named CEO of HP in September 2011.

“The company has built a lot of momentum,” Robison said in an interview. “It is an interesting spot to be in. We are focused on growth and expanding into new markets.”

Robison had a big ranch in Utah, and it’s no surprise that Fusion-io is based in Salt Lake City. Fusion-io grew quickly and went public on the strength of its business of using flash memory chips on circuit cards to accelerate virtualization, databases, cloud computing, big data, and performance applications in the data center. The  Fusion ioMemory platform just got some new competition from hard disk drive maker Seagate yesterday. The stock market is not taking the change well: Fusion-io shares are down 25 percent to $13.42 today.

“Shane Robison is a proven executive with the experience and expertise to lead Fusion-io as we enter our next phase of growth and development,” said Scott Sandell, lead independent director of the Fusion-io Board. “Over the course of his career, Shane has demonstrated an ability to develop the critical corporate strategies to help innovative companies scale and grow globally. Shane’s understanding of our business, significant international experience, and deep industry and partner relationships make him ideally suited to lead Fusion-io as we seek to accelerate the company’s strategic and financial goals to enhance shareholder value.”

“I am honored to lead Fusion-io through its next chapter of growth,” said Mr. Robison, in a statement. “Fusion-io has long been recognized for its visionary technology, and I look forward to working closely with the company’s talented team as we continue to develop the critical technology that we all rely on to deliver the world’s data faster. As the use of data grows, IT professionals need more effective and efficient ways to power their business-critical applications. Fusion-io has an incredible opportunity to continue to transform the software defined storage industry. Our customer relationships are strong, and working with the company’s exceptional management team, I am excited to lead Fusion-io.”

In the interview, Robison acknowledged that the change was sudden, but the board has been addressing strategic issues for a while. He said the company has a lot of competition, but it has to expand into new markets and innovate fast. Fusion-io has 850 employees.

“On behalf of the Board and entire Fusion-io team, I want to thank David and Rick for their significant contributions to the creation, development and growth of the company,” said Mr. Sandell. “David and Rick’s vision as co-founders has redefined memory technology and had a profound impact on our industry. Under their leadership, Fusion-io has developed into one of the world’s leading technology companies, helping businesses increase datacenter efficiency. They played an important role in taking the company public and developing a strong framework from which Fusion-io can grow to the next level.”

The company said the announcements are not related to “any issues regarding the integrity of the company’s financial statements or accounting policies and practices.” Fusion-io also reaffirmed the financial outlook for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2013. Revenue is expected to be about $110 million and the operating loss is expected to be $5 million. For the full year, revenue is expected to be $435 million and operating margin on a non-GAAP basis is expected to be 9.5 percent.

Robison has an easy-going personality and a cowboy’s demeanor. He holds computer science degrees from the University of Utah. Robison, along with former CEO Léo Apotheker, got some of the blame for HP’s horrible acquisition of software firm Autonomy.

“I”m a believer in everything as a service,” Robison said. “That is the correct vision. People are going to access computing on the software and services model, and we are at the heart of making that work. The trends are all about mobility and service-based models, where you can get information anytime and anywhere. This is the chance to leverage my 30 years of experience in this.”

Seagate was born many decades ago as a pioneer in hard disk drives, which are now generating $10 billion a year in revenue for the company. But now it is launching its own line of flash memory-based storage devices that mark a strategic shift for the company and the storage industry. Seagate first announced its move into flash, or solid-state drives (SSDs), in 2009. It has played in the enterprise flash market for a while, but now it is expanding into client-side SSDs.

Today, Seagate is unveiling its complete consumer-to-enterprise solid-state drive lineup that will be sold along with Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s hard disks and hybrid hard drives, or storage devices that combine both speedy flash memory chips and high-capacity hard disks. For consumers, this means that laptops should boot four times faster and applications should load twice as fast compared to a normal hard drive.

Gary Gentry, the senior vice president and general manager of Seagate’s solid state drive business, said in an interview with VentureBeat that Seagate is expanding its presence in the enterprise SSD market, which is about $8 billion in annual sales. The hard drive market is expected to be about $32.7 billion in 2013, down about 11.8 percent from $37.1 billion last year, according to market researcher IHS iSuppli. One of the reasons for that change is that SSDs are taking market share from hard drives. Hard drives have a cost advantage over SSDs, especially at higher storage densities. But SSDs are more power efficient and faster in some data center applications.

Seagate’s new lineup includes four major product lines: the Seagate 600 SSD, the Seagate 600 Pro SSD, the Seagate 1200 SSD, and a PCIe accelerator card, dubbed the Seagate X8 Accelerator powered by Virident. The latter product means that Seagate is going into battle with Fusion-io, which is a leader in the accelerator card market. Seagate made an investment in Virident in January, and the new card is a collaborative effort between the two companies.  Seagate is also fighting head-to-head with Fujitsu in the enterprise market.

The client-side Seagate 600 SSD has 6 gigabit-per-second performance and faster boot-up times than hard drives. The results means you won’t wait as long to access your programs and retrieve your data.

“SSDs continue to be among the most popular product categories on Newegg.com as more consumers increasingly turn to them to deliver more speed, faster boot-up times, and superior performance,” said Patrick Chung, the vice president of global product management at Newegg. “Seagate’s new line of SSDs, including the new 600 SSD, will be a great addition to our existing assortment. We’re excited to introduce the new SSDs to our customers and look forward to continuing our strategic partnership with Seagate.”

Tiger Direct, Rorke Data, and others will be selling the Seagate SSDs. The SSDs use about 2.8 watts while operating, dramatically reducing energy used compared to a hard drive. If the device loses power suddenly, it won’t lose the data. Seagate is pitching the products for both consumers and enterprises.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Violin Memory has expanded its strategic alliance with memory chip manufacturer Toshiba to provide faster Flash-based memory cards for data centers.

Under the deal, Mountain View, Calif.-based Violin Memory will team up to deliver a new generation of PCIe Flash memory cards for permanent data storage in enterprise servers. Those cards use Flash memory chips to replace hard disk drives in servers, making storage access faster and more energy-efficient. This replacement cycle is urgent so that corporations can deliver information in real time over the Internet without melting down their data centers with inefficient hardware.

The alliance is a deep one that involves supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and research and development. Japan’s Toshiba supplies about a third of the world’s NAND Flash memory chips, so it can bring big economies of scale to Violin, which takes the chips and turns them into enterprise storage products with the right software to enable real-time memory access. Violin estimates that its 6,000 Series Flash memory arrays are 53 times faster than disk drives when it comes to latency and 15 times faster at database performance, while using a fifth of the power and a 10th of the space.

“The PCIe card market is important to Toshiba’s customers,” said Hiroyuki Sato, the vice president of storage products division at Toshiba’s chip arm. “Expanding our strategic relationship with Violin Memory will allow us to bring the valuable Violin enterprise IP to a broad range industry leading solutions in our future product offerings.”

The world is moving toward enterprise transactions that have to take place in a split second. Violin improves that speed at the shared storage level in a server. With the Toshiba deal, Violin will have more visibility into the process of making Flash chips and getting them to the market. Violin will then be able to guarantee a steady supply of products for its customers. It can also deliver its Velocity PCIe card family for a lower cost.

Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, said that the more deeply Toshiba is involved with Violin Memory, the less trouble it will be for Violin when the next Flash memory shortage arrives. Toshiba also has good sales channels to sell Violin’s products.

“PCIe is where we think most growth will be for enterprise (flash memory chips) over the next five years,” Handy said.

“From smartphone and tablet, to server and the core of the enterprise data center and the cloud, the mobile world drives the need for memory-based architectures,” said Hiroyuki Sato of Toshiba.

Violin Memory’s newest 6,000 Series Flash memory arrays can process a million input-output operations in a second. Compared to last year, it can do that for 97 percent less rack space and 90 percent less energy.

“Our new focus on PCIe cards will allow both companies to drive radical new economics that lead to the mass adoption of memory-based architectures,” said Don Basile, chief executive of Violin Memory. “NAND memory is now a requirement at every level from the smart connected device to the core of the cloud and the enterprise data center. The combined product portfolios continue leadership across the evolving memory-based solution market.”

Violin Memory was founded in 2005 and it has 450 employees, more than double over the last 18 months. Its 300 customers include companies in telecommunications, banking, retail, government and healthcare businesses. To date, Violin Memory has raised $236 million from investors including SAP Ventures, Toshiba, Juniper Networks, GE Asset Management and others.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Infrastructure may not be the sexiest space, but Silicon Valley’s investors see ample opportunity to fund startups and chip away at dominant players like VMware and EMC.

One such startup is PernixData, a company that provides software to virtualize server-side flash memory. The first product will be launched in the next three months, and is aimed at large enterprises that use virtualization in their data center.

The company raised its first round of financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Bipul Sinha last year. Sinha and I discussed VMware’s shift back to infrastructure in a recent interview. He warned that the virtualization giant now faces competition “that will come up and disrupt them,” particularly from startups like PernixData.

The company was founded by CEO Poojan Kumar (pictured, left), a one-time head of data products at VMware and the cofounder of Oracle Exadata, and CTO Satyam Vaghani, the former technology lead for VMware’s storage solution.

Kumar said in an interview that the problem they are trying to address is that storage and performance barriers limited the penetration of virtualization within data centers. PernixData can help with that — and it embeds itself in the existing environment, so customers can leverage their existing data center investments.

“We allow enterprises to overcome the biggest impediments for fulfilling their vision for virtualized data centers and we do it with zero disruption,” said Kumar. PernixData addresses this using software rather than proprietary hardware, which can cause vendor lock-in. Its solution stitches together flash memory across many servers.  

“It was time to continue where VMware left off,” Kumar explained, adding that he hopes the startup is considered to be the “VMware of server flash.”

PernixData competes with myriad existing players, including Netapp and EMC, but the founders are confident given the positive response from the first 20 customers signed on to the beta.

The San Jose-based company has raised $7 million to date from investors including Sinha, who is also on the board, Mark Leslie, the co-founder and CEO of Veritas and early board member at VMware, John Thompson, former CEO of Symantec, and Lane Bess, the former CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

Top image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Flash storage business Fusion-io has launched its new ioScale product line, which promises to make all-flash-memory data centers a more feasible proposition for companies.

Ideally, ioScale makes the all-flash-drive data center more practical for companies that rely on high-performance hardware. Each one of ioScale’s units provides up 3.2 terabytes of Fusion ioMemory capacity, with prices starting at $3.89 per gigabyte. By offering ioScale to companies who order a minimum of just one hundred units, Fusion-io likely hopes to outgun competitors like SolidFire.

Fusion-io claims ioScale’s big benefits include:

• Up to 3.2 terabytes of capacity on a single half-length PCIe slot, which can enbable scaling to 12.8 terabytes or more and reduce the need for disk drive bays
• Hyperscale servers supporting UEFI
• High level endurance in all capacities
• Compatibility with the Fusion ioMemory SDK

Fusion-io CEO David Flynn wants the ioScale product line to be there for forward-thinking and young businesses that are willing to embrace an all-flash-memory approach for data centers, specifically “hyperscale and cloud companies.”

“By making ioScale available to growing webscale and emerging cloud companies, Fusion-io is at the forefront of the transition to the all-flash hyperscale data center, powered by open-software-defined solutions,” Flynn said in a statement. “Hyperscale companies are an entirely different market with different needs compared to enterprise organizations.”

Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io was founded in 2006.

Data center photo via Supri Suharjoto/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Venture capitalists are clambering to fund flash storage startups, the new wave of technologies that are disrupting the traditional data center.

The latest announcement comes from Virident Systems, a Milpitas, California-based company that had no trouble raising $26 million dollars in fourth round funding led by Mitsui Global Investors, with participation from Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Artiman Ventures. The company has also brought on a new CEO, Mike Gustafson, a former SVP and GM at Hitachi Data Systems. Gustafson will also take a position on the board of directors.

The space is crowded with legacy vendors and startups, but Gustafson said the market opportunity for flash is big enough for everybody. “Flash will be the touchpoint in every part of the data center infrastructure,” he said. “There is tremendous confidence around this space.”

Companies like Virident claim that data centers are running out of storage space and that we need a reliable alternative. According to Gustafson, flash-based memory is still too expensive to be a data center’s primary storage technology, but solid-state disks will replace mechanical hard disk drives in the coming years.

“The flash storage market is predicted to grow to $4 billion by 2015, and this investment only strengthens our conviction that Virident will become the primary industry provider of the fastest storage class memory solutions to the world’s leading enterprise datacenters,” said Sanjay Pichaiah, investment director at Mitsui Global Investment, in a statement.

Virident has attracted its customers, primarily high-tech companies, with the promise that it will reduce costs to tackle high-performance applications in the enterprise and is 10 times faster than the competition. Virident is most often compared to Fusion IO, a storage memory company that dominates in this space and counts Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.

Virident is not yet profitable, but with its latest funding round it will roll out an expansion of its sales and marketing team. Gustafson told me he joined the company as he sees potential for an IPO. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to $76 million.

Violin Memory and Symantec are announcing a deal today that will allow Violin to move up the food chain in flash memory storage systems for enterprises.

Violin makes storage devices that replace hard drives with arrays of flash memory chips in enterprises. That helps data center servers keep up with the huge demands of web users. But today the company is moving from a device provider to a storage system maker — one step up in the electronics food chain — thanks to an alliance with system security vendor Symantec. Violin is adding Symantec’s data management services to its arrays, making it easier to manage stored data.

Storage and the proper use of server resources have become complex issues for enterprises. Flash memory arrays, such as those Violin makes, help speed up the retrieval of data from memory. As companies consolidate their data centers through increased use of virtualization, or software that maximizes the efficient use of computing resources, they have to deal with the constraints of hard drives and older storage management systems. The result is that storage becomes a bottleneck to the whole system. But now Violin and Symantec are attacking part of that problem.

Violin says the result of its nine-month collaboration with Symantec is a storage solution that requires no compromises on speed, scale, reliability, and costs. Symantec’s software has been optimized to run on Violin’s memory arrays. The software includes snapshots, cloning, deduplication, replication, and thin provisioning. These are all functions that storage software has to handle in order to ensure that enterprise data is secure and backed up as much as possible.

“Violin is at the forefront of offering tier 1 storage that is built from the ground up,” said Narayan Venkat, vice president of products for Violin Memory. “We have been delivering storage at the speed of memory with disk array prices, and now we’ve partnered with Symantec to build a comprehensive flash-optimized data management suite that extends the benefits of speed and scale to data protection, disaster avoidance, and storage efficiency.”

“Symantec has been delivering data management and replication solutions for over a decade,” said Don Angspatt, vice president of product management for the Storage and Availability Management Group for Symantec Corp. “The opportunity to work with Violin, a leader in flash storage arrays, was exciting and the effort to optimize our technologies over the last year will provide enterprises a unique solution that will further enable the consolidation and virtualization of their data centers.”

Gerrit Schutte, senior vice president and CIO of ConAgra Foods and a Violin customer, said the combination of Violin and Symantec makes a compelling case for enterprise clients to use both vendors.

Pure Storage, a flash player that aims to disrupt the business of storage arrays, has received a $40 million fourth round of funding, led by Index Ventures.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, claims to offer an enterprise flash array that can drive down the cost of server storage. Pure Storage’s technology works by maximizing the amount of data that can be stored on solid state drives. The company uses a number of methods to reduce the amount of space on a hard disk, including deduplication and additional compression.

Pure Storage faces strong competition from XtremeIO, an Israeli flash company recently acquired by EMC.

At VMworld, an upcoming virtualization and cloud computing conference, the company will announce an update to its flagship product, FlashArray, which it claims will rival XtremeIO. The new features will tightly integrate with VMware, so it should come as no surprise that Helen Greene, cofounder and CEO of VMware, is a participating investor in the company’s Series D.

Pure Storage said it would use the funds to expand its operations to Europe and continue to scale operations in the U.S.

The latest funding round was led by Mike Volpi at Index Ventures, with participation from Greylock, Redpoint, Sutter Hill, angels from VMware and DataDomain, and others.

Fusion-io‘s parties have gotten pretty good since Steve Wozniak, c0-founder of Apple, became the company’s chief scientist. Tonight, the company threw a surprise birthday bash for Woz at the fancy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Hundreds of party-goers yelled “Surprise!” and sang “Happy Birthday” to Woz, who thought he was going to a product launch.

In fact, he was going to a product launch. Fusion-io, after all, has a board of directors and it wouldn’t look kindly on the company squandering a bunch of money on a private birthday party. So the company slipped in a cool visual light show highlighting the launch of its Ion Data Accelerator software, which can improve the computing efficiency of the corporate data centers that keep the internet humming.

The new product is a switch for Fusion-io, which makes flash-memory cards for high-performance data center computers known as servers. Those memory cards speed up the performance of the computer by storing memory in fast caches populated by row upon row of flash memory chips.

But the Ion Data Accelerator is software turns servers into open computing platforms with shared acceleration devices for multiple applications or clusters. It shares the ioMemory in a system across servers or applications, and it produces quicker response times and the ability to handle traffic spikes when lots of users converge on a web site.

But back to the party. David Flynn, chief executive of Fusion-io (pictured above left), gave a toast to Woz for inspiring his team to do great things. Flynn presented Wozniak with a framed picture of his very own DNA, obtained a couple of months ago when Woz’s wife, Janet Wozniak, got him to swab his cheek. The artists then took the DNA sample, decoded it, and made a painting (pictured above) from it.

Woz said that he believes that hardware is cool, but software is what makes it valuable, and that was what Fusion-io’s product launch was all about. A big chubby engineering comic (pictured above) with geeky glasses popped out of a birthday cake. Then he proceeded to worship Woz because he appeared on Dancing With the Stars, making engineering nerds seem cool. The comic proceeded to pull a card trick and then flashed the answer to the crowd by pulling down his pants and bending over. (Yes, it was too much information).

The Boise, Idaho Micron will also pay $334 million to gain 89 percent of another chip firm. Overall, the tie-ups worth $2.5 billion will give Micron a 50 percent boost in manufacturing capacity.

Elpida, which makes dynamic random-access memory, owned 65 percent of Rexchip Electronics Corporation. Micron’s purchase of a 24 percent stake from Powerchip Technology Corporation will give the U.S. memory maker 89 percent of Rexchip, the New York Times reports.

With the acquisition comes a number of  production plants. Elpida owns a chip fabrication site in Hiroshima, Japan. Rexchip has a plant in Taiwan, along with a testing location in Akita, Japan. Along with the increased manufacturing ability, Micron — the last U.S.-based memory maker — gains a long sought-after foothold in Asia.

“Micron has long had ambitions to acquire a rival Asian DRAM maker to boost its competitiveness. It attempted to acquire SK Hynix in 2002 for about $4 billion only to see talks fail after SK Hynix’s creditors—mostly state-owned banks—blocked the deal on concerns that SK Hynix would fall into foreign hands,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Dynamic RAM (or DRAM) chips are mostly used by desktop and laptop computers. By comparison, flash memory is primarily used by mobile devices, including cell phones, tablets and related devices.

Hynix was the fourth-largest flash memory producer, with Micron No. 2. Today’s purchase may allow Micron to make up some ground on No. 1 flash memory-maker Samsung.

The Boise, Idaho memory maker has aimed to expand beyond DRAM to more lucrative contracts for flash memory used in smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone and iPad tablet. Earlier this year, Micron paid Intel $600 million to buy two flash memory manufacturing plants.

Under the deal, Strategic will help DensBits provide customers with low-cost, high-performance Solid State Drives, or chips based on flash memory technology. Those chips will be targeted at the consumer and enterprise markets.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Seagate invested an undisclosed amount for an equity stake in Haifa, Israel-based DensBits. It will make future products based on DensBits’ Memory Modem controller technology, which will be combined with Seagate’s various storage technologies including its 3-bits-per-cell 1Xnm Flash-based consumer-grade SSDs, and its 2 bits per cell 1Xnm Flash-based enterprise SSDs.

“We are very excited at the opportunity of collaborating with Seagate,” said DensBits chief executive Ilan Hen. “This is yet another testament to our technology leadership, and we strongly believe that the coupling between DensBits’ unique Memory Modem controller technology and Seagate’s exceptional storage capabilities across the board could truly disrupt the industry.”

DensBits improves the reliability of flash memory chips and brings down its costs without compromising on performance. Since flash memory is typically not 100 percent reliable, a considerable part of each chip has to be set aside for a process known as error correction. With better reliability, less error correction is necessary, and the overall chip can be much more efficient.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

EMC said today it has acquired flash-memory storage company XtremIO, following reports two weeks ago that the deal was in the works. VentureBeat confirmed at the time that the value of the deal is around $400 million.

EMC did not release terms of the deal, saying only that it was an all-cash transaction that did not have material impact for its earnings. It said more details will be presented at EMC World May 21-24 (see press release below).

As reported two weeks ago, the deal is the latest sign that the flash storage market is hot, and it could spur other deals as other big players, such as NetApp, are pressured to make their own plays.

Flash storage is big because it’s where all large enterprises are moving to store their massive amounts of data — due to its superior performance at lower prices. And big players like EMC have older generation products that don’t perform as well as newer, well, flashier products like XtremIOs. NetApp is another large company, competing with EMC, that is almost certainly looking to acquire a similar player.

In our previous report, we highlighted that Fusion-io might be the next target. The company is a relatively young, but fast-growing publicly traded company that has qualities similar to XtremIO. It plays at the high-end of the market, offering extremely fast performance. However, Fusion-io’s market value is now significant, and the company appears to be ready to hold out for a higher price, given its momentum.

We’re now thinking Violin Memory might be an easier target. That company plays in the same top end of the market, but is still private, and so more easily acquired. Just ten days ago, Violin said it had finished raising $80 million in its latest round, putting its private valuation at over $800 million. A third company in this segment is Kaminario, which raised a $15 million third round of capital last year from Sequoia and other backers.

In some ways, though, the market for these products can be considered analogous to that of the sports car — a wonderful, beautiful machine that does zero to 60 in a few seconds, and handles corners with ease. Not everyone needs it, but people who cherish performance do. Banks and other institutions with massive amounts of data and requiring speed and precision are the customers in this segment.

Most companies run web sites and infrastructure that don’t require such speed. Carrying the auto industry analogy further, the biggest chunk of the market — the one accommodating most web sites — is served by storage companies that can be considered sedans or SUVs. And that’s where a host of other storage players now operate, according to Kieran Harty, CEO of Tintri, who says his company is like a “higher end sedan.” And in this mid-market, the leading vendors are also using virtualization technology and that’s what is creating so much disruption, Harty said.

So while $400M is a great deal for XtremIo, Harty says he’s looking to build Tintri into a “multi-billion dollar” company.

The EMC-XtremIO acquisition press release is below:

• EMC acquires Flash storage pioneer XtremIO
• XtremIO’s all-Flash, scale-out, enterprise storage architecture was designed to leverage Flash memory.
• XtremIO technology to complement the range of EMC Flash-based systems and software stemming from EMC’s early entry into the Flash storage market.
• The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2012 fiscal year.
• Additional details will be presented at EMC World

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that it has acquired privately held XtremIO. Widely regarded as one of the world’s premier Flash storage architecture pioneers, Herzliya, Israel-based XtremIO provides an added dimension as EMC^® continues to enhance and broaden its world-leading Flash storage portfolio. The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2012 fiscal year.

XtremIO’s all-Flash, scale-out, enterprise storage architecture was designed to leverage the speed and unique abilities of Flash memory. The addition of XtremIO extends EMC’s lead in developing and delivering networked storage infrastructures that are dynamically optimized for performance, intelligence, and protection for both physical and virtualized cloud environments.

Additional details will be provided at EMC World, which is being held May 21-24 at the Venetian in Las Vegas.

EMC Flash Leadership

The addition of XtremIO complements the range of EMC Flash-based systems and software stemming from EMC’s early entry into the Flash storage market in 2008 when it became the first to integrate Flash drives into enterprise storage arrays.  In 2011, EMC shipped to customers over 24 PBs of Flash drive capacity.

Flash drives in the EMC VMAX , VMAXe , VNX, VNXe and Isilon storage arrays now enable customers to achieve an order of magnitude better performance than 15K HDDs  for those applications and data sets requiring the additional performance.  Placing Flash technology in the server on a PCIe card, as evidenced by EMC VFCache, can accelerate performance up to another order of magnitude than 15K HDDs. EMC has also announced “Project Thunder,” optimized for high-frequency, low-latency read/write workloads. Project Thunder will build upon the advanced PCIe technology delivered in VFCache to leverage the power of Flash through a dedicated Server Networked Flash-based appliance. EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) software  enables customers to automatically move high-performance—or “hot”—data to enterprise Flash drives to improve application and storage system performance, and automatically move less-active data to SAS/FC and NL-SAS/ SATA storage tiers to reduce costs.

EMC Executive Quote

Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products

“XtremIO brings to EMC amazing technology with a fantastic team that’s captured praise from early-view customers and many of the industry’s foremost thinkers. We fully expect XtremIO technology, once introduced to market, to have a tremendous impact on our customer’s ability to leverage the unique advantages of all-Flash storage across many of their most demanding applications.”

Flash memory is hot because it runs cooler than other kinds of storage in the data center. It’s also faster and more efficient at storing frequently used data. Violin Memory is one of the companies that is benefiting from this trend in the data center.

And the trend has helped Violin boost its latest funding round from $50 million to $80 million, according to AllThingsD. Previously, Mountain View, Calif.-based Violin had raised a fourth round at an $800 million valuation. Investors in that deal included Toshiba, Juniper Networks, SAP VEntures, and Highland Capital.

But the round was oversubscribed and it reached $80 million, with the addition of new investors GE Capital Management. Violin chief executive Don Basile said that the funding is the latest step toward an initial public offering. Four banks are involved in that: J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America Merrill-Lynch, and Barclay’s. The IPO could happen by Oct. 27.

Last June, flash memory company Fusion-io went public in an offering that valued the company above $2 billion.

Violin Memory makes flash memory arrays like the one pictured above. Those are used as primary storage for servers in enterprise data centers. The arrays replace slower disk drives.

The main storage for data in servers has traditionally been the hard-disk drive. Flash memory devices — which are solid-state semiconductor chips — have been much faster than the spinning magnetic disks. But the reliability and the storage density used to be too low for flash memory. Improvements on that front have enabled flash to be used as primary data storage. Violin says it can improve the performance of Oracle databases by ten times. The addressable market of hard drive arrays is $20 billion, as measured by Gartner. That market is vulnerable to replacement by smaller servers with incredible amounts of input-output performance, Basile told VentureBeat.

Customers include AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Juniper, and Hewlett-Packard. Violin has now raised $182 million since a recapitalization in 2009. The company was founded in 2005, launched its first memory arrays in 2009, and has since deployed multiple product generations using RAID protection for reliability. In June 2010, Violin acquired Gear6.

Fusion-io does server caching, but direct rivals include makers of arrays of hard disks. Those direct rivals include EMC, Network Appliance, IBM, Hitachi, and Dell. There are perhaps dozens of startups trying to do flash array. The company has grown from 100 employees a year ago to more than 320.

Fusion-io has been mostly known as an enterprise company helping big names like Apple and Facebook to save money on their data center costs.

But today, the company is announcing its first software development kit (SDK) to provide software developers with native access to the ioMemory flash platform. The Fusion-io team is hoping the next Mark Zuckerberg will build his or her company with Fusion-io at its foundation.

Fusion-io CEO David Flynn compared this moment to the seminal shift between programming for tape and working with a disc. On only a handful of occasions in the past 60 years have software developers been given fundamentally new programming building blocks for memory or storage devices, the company explained. Until now, developers have been limited to tuning their applications for flash as storage. The ioMemory SDK libraries unlock direct programmatic access to native flash access patterns and data organization methods.

One of the beta testers for this new SDK was CitrusLeaf, a NoSQL database.

“Direct programmatic access to the ioMemory tier presents a rare and significant leap forward for computing, and theioMemory SDK makes that integration powerfully simple for application developers,” said Citrusleaf founder and CTO Brian Bulkowski in a statement. “When you consider that Fusion-io is already well known for accelerating applications, it’s exciting that bypassing traditional protocols in favor of direct access to ioMemory would mean an even greater performance boost in Citrusleaf’s NoSQL database for mission criticalwebscale applications. Our existing real time big data customers require low latency and extraordinary throughput, and with this revolution in application acceleration, end users will start asking if applications can run native on ioMemory.”

Onstage today at DEMO, Bulkowski gave an example of Fusion-io’s tech at work: an application with 400,000 transactions per second running on a single database server, representing a huge decrease in the amount of native memory required.

The ioMemory SDK, explained Fusion-io, will feature APIs including the Key-Value Store, which will feature interfaces to reduce latency, improve memory efficiency, and reduce code complexity.

“Improving the performance of input/output (I/O) bound applications or systems could be more pronounced and cost-effective if the choice of data to hold in flash memory is done in an intelligent and application-aware way,” said Gartner analyst Carl Claunch in a statement. “Competitive advantages for software will be the main driver pushing those makers to exploit flash as a unique memory type.”

Fusion-io is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

FRX Polymers raises $26.7M for eco-friendly plastics

In the green-tech arena, FRX Polymers announced a $26.7 million second round of funding on Friday. The company has made an environmentally friendly plastic that is flame retardant for consumer electronics and other applications. DB Masdar Fund and BASF Venture Capital led the round.

Everything.me gets money for better mobile search

Mobile search app Everything.me raised $3.5 million in funding from Horizons Ventures. The company recently pivoted and offers an app that searches multiple places for information about a certain topic. For instance, if you search for country singer Taylor Swift, Everything.me would grab YouTube videos of her, her Wikipedia page, tweets, and IMDB information.

Learnzillion secures $2.4 million for video learning

Learnzillion announced a $2.4 million first round of funding on Friday. The company hosts short video lessons for students and teachers to improve math and literacy skills. DC Community Ventures led the round, with participation from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Learn Capital Venture Partners, NewSchools Venture Fund, Citybridge Foundation, ULU Ventures, and Calvert Social Investment Fund

Violin Memory grabs new funding for flash memory

Violin Memory has raised $50 million in a fourth round of funding at a market value of more than $800 million, the company said today. The company makes flash memory arrays that are used in enterprise data center servers. Toshiba, Juniper Networks, SAP Ventures, and Highland Capital all participated in the funding.

If you’ve got funding news to report, send it our way at tips@venturebeat.com.

Plastic bottles image via Shutterstock

Mountain View, Calif.-based Violin Memory makes flash memory arrays like the one pictured above. Those are used as primary storage for servers in enterprise data centers. The arrays replace slower disk drives.

Investors include long-time partners Toshiba and Juniper Networks, and new investors SAP Ventures and Highland Capital. Other participants in the funding don’t allow their names to be used.

“At the intersection of big data, virtualization, and business critical applications, Violin’s flash-based primary storage puts us in a unique position to capitalize on they hyper-growth of flash in the enterprise data center,” said Don Basile, chief executive of Violin Memory, in a statement “This is a multibillion-dollar market opportunity and the latest funding enables us to accelerate our aggressive go-to market strategy and enhance our data management software portfolio to bring the benefits of Violin’s technology to customers worldwide.”

The main storage for data in servers has traditionally been the hard-disk drive. Flash memory devices — which are solid-state semiconductor chips — have been much faster than the spinning magnetic disks. But the reliability and the storage density used to be too low for flash memory. Improvements on that front have enabled flash to be used as primary data storage. Violin says it can improve the performance of Oracle databases by ten times. The addressable market of hard drive arrays is $20 billion, as measured by Gartner. That market is vulnerable to replacement by smaller servers with incredible amounts of input-output performance, Basile said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Customers include AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Juniper and Hewlett-Packard. Violin has now raised $152 million since a recapitalization in 2009. The company was founded in 2005 and launched its first memory arrays in 2009 and has since deployed multiple product generations using RAID protection for reliability. In June 2010, Violin acquired Gear6.

Fusion-io does server caching, but direct rivals include makers of arrays of hard disks. Those direct rivals include EMC, Network Appliance, IBM, Hitachi and Dell. There are perhaps dozens of startups trying to do flash arrays, Basile said. The company has grown from 100 employees a year ago to more than 320 now.

“We see 2012 as a key adoption year,” he said. “We tripled our employment in the past year. We continue to grow sales and fairly aggressively on the engineering side.”

The new round is a mezzanine round that will enable the company to continue its rapid growth, Basile said.

The news came after a drop in memory chip prices and a failed financing attempt. The Japanese company was formed in 1999 from the memory operations of NEC and Hitachi, and its collapse is part of an inevitable consolidation in the industry.

The company lost money for five quarters in a row and listed liabilities of $5.6 billion, according to the BBC. The company’s market value fell by 95 percent in the last five years, and it will be delisted on March 28 from the Tokyo Stock Exchange. DRAM prices fell 85 percent (thanks to lower-than-expected PC sales), and a strong yen hurt the company’s profits. Japan’s government and banks bailed out the company in 2009, to no avail. The recent Japan quake also hurt the company.

Rivals such as Samsung have successfully diversified into flash memory and mobile DRAM for mobile handheld devices such as the Apple iPad and iPhone. Elpida, on the other hand, failed to move quickly into that market. Other DRAM chip makers have had a tough time too. Bloomberg said that Elpida, Hynix, and others have lost $14 billion in the past three years. Fujitsu exited the business last year.

Elpida defaulted on six bonds for its debt as they came due yesterday. Vijay Rakesh, an analyst at SterneAgee, said the bankruptcy will likely result in lower capacity in the larger DRAM industry. Elpida may sell off its assets, he said, to pay off creditors. Beneficiaries could include Taiwan’s Powerchip, Idaho’s Micron, and Samsung.

Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, said, “Elpida has good technology, but is simply unable to compete in an oversupplied world market using prices that are yen-based.” He noted the company is Japan’s last remaining DRAM maker. Some observers believe that Japan’s government will intervene to keep the company afloat out of national pride, but Handy doubts that will happen. Handy said it’s unlikely DRAM prices will stabilize after the exit of Elpida.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

How do you sex up an input-output system that will blow away data center bottle necks? Have Verne Troyer announce it at a groovy DEMO party with drink serving go-go girls!

Fusion-io, announced its new auto commit memory system, which allows a company to execute one billion input-output commands per second (called IOPS by techies) in a rack of eight servers. Previously, an I/O rate that high would require a roomful of servers, the company said. This plays into Fusion-io’s goal of shrinking the data system and making it as efficient as possible. Fusion-io chief scientist and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak described it as, “least costly, most efficient, fastest operating.”

The company, which went public in June 2011, has grown based on its ability to deliver newer, faster ways of moving data from storage to server CPUs, as people learn more about the information at their finger tips. Fusion-io’s flash chips are more reliable than traditional solid-state disks (SSDs) and are much faster. The company released its first chip, at the DEMO conference in 2008, and released its newest iteration, the ioDrive 2 in October 2011. The ioDrive 2′s purpose is to speed up web page load time, while not overheating your servers.

For David Flynn, chief executive of Fusion-io, the company’s main purpose is to deliver useful products to the cloud computing generation, and move away from the outdated hard drive storage still used in many data centers.

The New York Stock Exchange uses Fusion-io’s technology. Not coincidentally, it is also the exchange Fusion-io stock trades on.

This new technology is called auto commit memory, which, according to Fusion-io’s blog, “is a new memory type that uses the underlying flash to present a persistent memory directly to applications.” It’s an extension to Fusion-io’s ioMemory architecture, and promises to significantly reduce latency and overhead in servers when transferring data.

For the press conference, the company set up a rack of eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers, each equipped with eight ioDrive2 Duos, and displayed a meter on-screen that they said showed the rack was executing one billion I/Ops. Fusion-io was able to execute a million in 2009. The next year it did the same with HP’s servers. The auto commit memory extension will be available in April of this year.

“The company culture starts from the beginning,” said Wozniak at the event. “One of my big jobs was recognizing what was beautiful about the various products. What’s in that rack there, last time we were here, would have filled this room.”

The company is able to achieve this by making chips that speed the process of moving data from short term to long term memory by putting data closer to the processors which will call for it first. The average processor utilization today is less than 20 percent, says Flynn. So by making memory faster, he says, Fusion-io’s technology can potentially improve server performance fivefold, by getting CPU utilization closer to 100 percent.

Wozniak, Flynn and Fusion-io chief marketing officer Rick White announced the product at the DEMO event, Enterprise Disruption: An Evening of Change and Innovation in San Francisco.

Check out the announcement video with Verne Troyer above. And don’t miss our gallery of photos of Woz and special guest Leonard Nimoy.

If the report is true, the acquisition would give Apple a leg up when it comes to stuffing more flash storage — which is still among the most expensive bits of hardware — into its devices. Anobit has developed a controller chip that speeds up flash performance.

Such a deal makes sense for Apple, since flash memory is an essential component in the iPhone, iPod Touch, and MacBook Air (which certainly won’t be the last Mac to ship with a solid-state storage drive). The report originally appeared in the Israeli newspaper Calcalist.

Apple rarely purchases hardware companies, choosing instead to spend its massive cash reserves on software companies, as TechCrunch reports. But Anobit would certainly fit nicely with Apple’s purchase of P.A. Semi in 2008, which was instrumental in developing the company’s A4 and A5 mobile chips. The acquisition would also be Apple’s first in Israel, which has become a hotbed of innovation in the past decade.

Calcalist also speculates that the acquisition would allow Apple to double the amount of flash memory on its mobile devices. It could, for example, help the company offer a 32 gigabyte iPhone for $200 with contract, instead of $300.

As Reuters notes, Anobit supplies its products to memory companies like Hynix, which is now the main flash supplier for the iPhone 4S.

Image via iFixit

IHS forecast in September that the world chip industry would grow 2.9 percent. The industry, which provides chips for all things electronic and is a bellwether for the tech economy, faces major economic headwinds this year thanks to uncertainty in Europe and the stock market.

In the third quarter, the chip market is expected to expand 3.5 percent compared to the previous quarter. That is down from the September forecast of 4.8 percent. While the third quarter was weaker than predicted, the growth was still positive in terms of the full-year forecast.

“Although the forecast of 1.2 percent revenue growth in 2011 is just barely positive, an expansion of any magnitude is significant from the standpoint of market psychology,” said Dale Ford, analyst at IHS. “Given the worsening economic environment and growing pessimism in the electronics supply chain, many market forecasters had projected third-quarter revenues would decline and pull down the results for the full year of 2011.”

In the fourth quarter, revenue is expected to decline 2 percent from the third quarter. If the industry actually fell 7 percent in the fourth quarter from the third, then overall chip revenue growth would be negative for 2011.

Even though the overall industry is slowing, a number of chip makers are expected to have solid growth in the fourth quarter. Those include Intel, Samsung, Renesas, Qualcomm and Advanced Micro Devices. Bright spots include microprocessors, image sensors and NAND flash memory. Each segment is growing more than 15 percent this year. Sensors and actuators will grow more than 5 percent, but the memory market is weighing down the whole chip sector, with declines of 15 percent or more for different types of memory.

The electronics industry took a big hit this year in the second and third quarters as a result of the disaster in Japan. That took out about 2.5 percentage points in the second quarter and resulted in a market decline in that period.

Meanwhile, flooding in Thailand is expected to reduce hard disk drive shipments by 30 percent in the fourth quarter. That will cause PC shipments to fall short of expectations, taking a further toll on chip sales. By the first quarter, hard drive inventories will be depleted and the lost production will take its toll in that quarter. Weak economic conditions are expected to last into 2012. For 2012, chip revenue growth is expected to be 3.2 percent, and real growth won’t return until 2013.

The funding is a rare one for a chip maker, but Virident is playing in one of the hottest parts of the market, where data centers use more flash memory in their servers in order to reduce power consumption and improve their ability to process an enormous amount of data quickly.

Milpitas, Calif.-based Virident is introducing its FlashMax MLC product today, a circuit board (pictured left) that contains a lot of power-efficient flash memory chips for use in data center servers. One card can process 1.4 million input-output operations per second, or as much as a few thousands hard disk drives put together. That means that an entire rack of servers could be condensed into a single server.

“We spent five years focused on how to make flash storage work for the enterprise data center,” said Kumar Ganapathy, chief executive and co-founder of the company, in an interview. “We have experience understanding the physics of flash and have crafted a way for our customers to deploy these flash devices that improve their performance.”

This kind of storage is the only way to deal with the growing gap in the data center, where servers are speedy but memory is too slow to keep feeding data to the processors. The flash cards can be used to store more frequently accessed data in a way that it is much easier and faster to retrieve, in comparison to accessing data stored on a hard disk drive. It also allows for more power efficiency, allowing data centers to reduce their power consumption, which has become the biggest cost for operating a data center.

The investors include Globespan Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Cisco, Sequoia Capital, and Artiman Ventures. With Intel and Cisco, Virident will gain strategic access to computing and storage partners and customers. Intel actually makes flash chips that Virident uses in its cards.

The company was founded in 2006 (by Ganapathy, Raj Parekh, and Vijay Karamcheti) and now has more than 100 employees. Rivals include Fusion-io, LSI Logic, and Texas Memory Systems. Just yesterday, Fusion-io said it would raise another $100 million by issuing new shares on the public market. Fusion-io went public earlier this year.

Virident started out with the NOR flavor of flash memory in an alliance with Spansion. In the past 18 months, it has switched to NAND flash memory. It is now shipping to more than 40 customers, and the new generation of cards is in the hands of customers, Ganapathy said.

Ganapathy said the company is targeting the highest-performance PCIe-attached memory with high storage capacity. Each card has as much as 1,400 gigabytes of usable memory, with as many as 64 chip packages on each card. The company also creates software to ensure reliability even in the event that some of the chips fail. Each data center can use lots and lots of these cards. Ganapathy said the company’s products perform well across a wide variety of data sizes and workloads.

To date, the company has raised $50 million in three rounds.

Flash memory chips are breaking into enterprise servers because of increasing reliability and faster performance compared to hard drives. Fusion-io rode that wave with an ioDrive first introduced four years ago. Now the company is introducing its ioDrive 2 single and dual configuration flash cards, which can dramatically speed up the time it takes to load your web pages without overheating a server.

“It’s really quite a feat to use the dense memory of flash and its better performance in the data center,” said David Flynn, chief executive of Fusion-io, in an interview. “With flash, we are finally seeing a shift for data-intensive applications.”

The company made the announcement at the start of the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Fusion-io, based in Salt Lake City, was founded in 2005, debuted at the DEMO conference in fall 2008, and went public this summer by riding on the trend of relieving the data crunch in servers. Fusion-io makes memory cards (pictured below) with speedy flash-memory chips on them. The company recently acquired IO Turbine and reported revenues of $197.2 million for the fiscal year ended June 30, up 445 percent from a year earlier. Earnings were $4.6 million, compared to a loss of $32.5 million a year earlier.

The flash card puts memory where it’s needed, close to the server’s microprocessor, which needs a constant stream of data to stay at peak processing speed. This significantly reduces latency, or the time it takes to fetch data back and forth from memory, compared to getting data from a combination of random access memory chips and hard disk drives.

Fusion-io designs the controller technology for the flash chips and sources the chips from commodity flash manufacturers. The secret sauce lies in the controller chip, which manages all of the different memory chips on a circuit card, which plugs into a server. Fusion-io also creates the virtual software stack that integrates the memory into the computer system, Flynn said.

“That’s why we can run applications so much faster on the servers,” Flynn said.

Fusion-io gives the storage capacity of drives and the performance that you would otherwise get out of random access memory chips. The new generation of ioMemory also bypasses a bunch of the bottlenecks that stood in the way of the flash memory. The new generation of ioDrive2 beats the previous generation on all metrics for capacity, reliability, performance and cost.

The new drives have a 15-microsecond write latency, 3 gigabytes per second bandwidth, over 700,000 read input output operations per second (IOPS), and 900,000 write IOPS. The cards are more reliable because they have a self-healing feature called Adaptive FlashBack, which enables the ioMemory to repair itself in case one chip fails. What does all of that mean? One card can transfer an entire DVD in less than 2 seconds, Flynn said.

Corporations such as Facebook are already using the first generation products in large amounts and are expected to use the new generation for trading platforms, enterprise resource planning systems, virtual environments, enterprise applications, and databases, Flynn said. He said that the speed of the performance will likely enable new applications that could never be done before.

It is not that hard to understand why getting data out of flash memory instead of slower hard drives is important. Facebook recently launched its Timeline feature, which gives users access to their entire history of Facebook posts at a glance. If you scroll down the Timeline web page, you can see just about every important event in your Facebook history. That data would normally be stored in archives, which could be stored on slower hard disk drives or even tape storage. But now that data has to be accessed in a split second, so it makes sense that something like the faster flash memory chips would be used. The chips can also be used to keep stock exchanges and other financial companies operating at full tilt.

Fusion-io worked on the new design for most of the past year. The new design uses flash chips that are based on a more advanced manufacturing process than the previous generation used, Flynn said. While past flash chips were designed to look like hard disk drives to data center operating systems, the new flash chips are designed to work directly with the operating systems.

“Instead of designing flash to work like the wheels on a horse and buggy, we designed [it] to work like the wheels on a car,” Flynn said. “There are a lot of others who build horse and buggy tires. We design for Formula One cars.”

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, joined Fusion-io as chief scientist because he liked the company’s elegant hardware design so much. Analyst firm IDC recently said in a white paper, Datacenter of the Future, that Fusion-io’s technology can help overcome the inefficiencies of traditional data centers. Fusion-io can deliver high performance, reduce operational and capital expenses, and lower power consumption, said IDC analyst and vice president Benjamn Woo.

Fusion ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo will be offered in 365 gigabyte (GB), 785 GB, 1205 GB and 2.4 terabyte capacities, beginning in November. The first production run is already allocated to existing customers. Pricing for Fusion’s new ioMemory platform starts at a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $5,950. Fusion-io has more than 500 employees now.

Flash memory technology has been gaining ground in enterprise data centers because it can reduce the time it takes to fetch data from slower hard drives and other types of memory. That’s why sales of enterprise flash memory (solid state drives) are growing to 4 million units in 2015, up 50 times from 2010 numbers, according to market researcher Objective Analysis. The use of more flash in data centers has enabled enterprise flash memory companies such as Fusion-io to go public.

The company’s product is called FlashSoft SE, and it is commercially available today. Several customers are using it in critical business environments in data centers. The software gets around a couple of barriers. When used as primary data storage, flash memory cannot easily work with existing storage systems. Also, storing all of an application’s data on server-based flash memory is costly.

FlashSoft can get around these problems through virtualization technology. Among the customers trying out FlashSoft is Zenprise, a mobile service management provider for mobile phones. Zenprise saw a 10-fold improvement in application performance as a result of using FlashSoft, said Jay Gausch, manager of customer relations at Zenprise. That allows Zenprise to get by with fewer servers than it otherwise might.

Trion Worlds, another customer, used FlashSoft to eliminate delays from business intelligence gathered from its online games. Now the company’s analytics information runs faster than it otherwise would.

Thomvest Ventures led the first round of funding in Mountain View, Calif.-based FlashSoft. Other investors include Divergent Ventures, Bullpen Capital, and Accelerator Ventures. FlashSoft SE is available for free evaluation through a 30-day free trial program. FlashSoft said it is collaborating with software and storage firms including VMware, Microsoft, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions, Virident Systems, LSI, OCZ Technology and Amax.

FlashSoft was founded in 2009 and has 12 employees. Rivals include makers of enterprise flash memory caching software, flash memory hardware makers, and storage vendors. Angel investors include Matt Ocko of Archimedes Capital and Paul Martino and Duncan Davidson of Bullpen Ventures.

The company is focused on using flash memory, typically found in consumer technology like USB flash drives or MP3 players, to make enterprise storage more efficient. Currently, many enterprises use storage that seeks and spins disks to access information. With flash, enterprises could theoretically save money as there is no seeking or spinning, saving seconds on accessing info. Of course, this is all theory as the company’s product is still in private beta. A more detailed explanation on how flash works can be found here.

The SEC filing includes the names of both founder and chief technologist, John Colgrove, and chief executive, Scott Dietzen. In addition, a host of investors are mentioned, including Aneel Bhusri (Greylock), Satish Dharmaraj (Redpoint Ventures), Mark Leslie (former Veritas CEO) and Mike Speiser (Sutter Hill Ventures).

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, has raised close to $53 million in total funding.

The third round of funding values Violin Memory at $440 million. It shows that providing power-efficient memory systems to data centers is still a growth business as a tsunami of internet traffic puts more and more pressure on the servers that serve web pages in corporate data centers.

The deal comes on the heels of the company’s second $35 million round raised in February. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company says the new funding will help the company surpass $100 million in revenue growth this year.

Violin Memory makes “scalable memory arrays” such as the one shown in the picture where lots of fast flash memory chips are used to access frequently used data in servers. The chips reduce the load on servers and thereby save a lot of energy.

The company competes with other companies that are seeing significant attention in the markets. Fusion-IO has a pending initial public offering; EMC is accelerating flash storage adoption. Violin Memory’s chief executive, Don Basile, said Violin is planning on becoming a billion-dollar company and wants to be the fastest-growing storage company of the decade. Basile was formerly CEO of Fusion-IO.

Some of the drivers of increased demand for flash memory arrays include the growth of 4G, mobile apps, social commerce, cloud computing and the growth in web traffic. The result is like a 100-year-flood of demand for data storage and processing, said Joseph Unsworth, research director at market analyst firm Gartner. Enterprise flash memory will likely be a $4.2 billion opportunity in 2015, Gartner says.

Violin Memory’s arrays were recently used by Hewlett-Packard to set a new transaction processing record with its servers. Those servers, in turn, are transforming the data centers for companies like AOL, Perforce and Microsoft.

Violin Memory was founded in 2005.

The teardown reveals the components inside the tablet computer and who made them. The information is instructive because Apple’s suppliers could generate a lot of sales providing parts for the iPad 2, which is likely to sell in the tens of millions of units. Getting a peak inside the iPad 2 is like looking inside an engineering marvel, where everything has its place and is packed as tightly as possible to save on space and cost.

Broadcom is one of the clear winners, since it has several chips in the device. They include a Broadcom BCM5973KFBG microcontroller for the touchscreen, a Broadcom capacitive touchscreen controller, and a Broadcom combo chip that handles Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM tuner functions. That’s the same chip as used in the iPad and iPhone 4.

The device has some previously known components. It has a 1-gigahertz dual core Apple-designed A5 ARM-based processor. That chip is most likely fabricated by Samsung, but the teardown doesn’t reveal who made the chip. The A5 processor has manufacturing dates of late January and mid-February, which means that production was gearing up at the last possible minute. The chip has a built-in graphics system from Imagination Technologies.

Of course, companies such as Intel, Nvidia, Marvell and more would love to be inside this machine. But no such luck this time around.

The device has 512 megabytes of LPDDR2 random access memory, or the main memory that stores data when the machine is running programs. It has a 9.7-inch LED backlit multitouch display and a couple of cameras. It’s sound speaker is mono, not stereo.

The lithium ion polymer battery is a 3.8 volt 25-watt-hour unit, which gives the machine its 10-hour operational battery life. This particular device has Toshiba NAND flash memory that has 16 gigabytes of storage. Other models have 32 or 64 gigabytes of flash. It also has a Dialog Semi power management chip and a Texas Instruments touchscreen line driver. There is also a Cirrus audio codec.

STMicroelectronics makes both the accelerometer and the gyroscope chips that enable you to control the machine by tilting it in different directions. As for ease of repair, iFixit rates the machine at 4 out of 10.

Salt Lake City, Calif.-based Fusion-io (a DEMO veteran) has had great success selling its devices into financial institutions that can benefit from its five-fold increase in memory data transfer. But the new vendors can carry Fusion-io into a wider variety of data centers, thanks to the benefit that Fusion-io brings in energy efficient computing. With the better memory module designs from Fusion-io, companies can reduce power consumption, cut cooling expenses, and eliminate expensive storage solutions. At the same time, they can vastly improve performance.

Fusion-io said that IBM will now offer eight versions of input-output adapters based on Fusion-io’s ioMemory technology across a dozen different IBM servers. That’s a big expansion and a bigger endorsement by Big Blue for Fusion-io. The new adapters will be available on March 1. Supermicro is also using Fusion-io in a new line of server and storage devices.

The Fusion-io flash memory speeds the process of transferring data from temporary memory to permanent memory by placing data closer to the processor that needs it the most. A single ioMemory module has the capacity of 100 traditional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) memory modules and the performance of 1,000 hard disk drives. The Fusion-io products are memory modules that can be added into servers housed in racks within a big data center.

Fusion-io says its performance increases range from three times to 10 times, depending on the application. Fusion-io was founded in 2006 and has more than 370 employees. The company was started by David Flynn and Rick White. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak serves as its chief scientist. Rivals include LSI and other memory chip makers. Fusion-io’s customers include Zappos, MySpace, Wine.com, Answers.com, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

The company has raised $115.5 million in three rounds. Investors include Meritech Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Triangle Peak Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Ventures, and Sumitomo Ventures. Dell and HP are also partners.

Today, the company is launching a new line of flash memory chips that Kispert says can be used in a wide variety of next-generation consumer electronics devices, automobile electronics, and game devices. If they take off, they can help Spansion thrive in a market with larger competitors and at a time of an overall industry recovery. It’s also a test as to whether pressing the gas pedal on innovation will help a once-struggling tech company recover.

The new chips are for the age of instantly accessible devices.

“What has changed in the last 18 months is that everybody wants a device that turns on instantly,” Kispert says. “That means the memory has to be interactive. That’s perfect for our business.”

The Spansion GL-S family of NOR flash memory chips allow you to tap a button and instantly begin using a device such as a car navigation system. They’re not the kind of popular NAND flash chips that are used as substitutes for large hard disk drives in laptops, as the Spansion chips range in density from 128 megabits to 2 gigabits of storage. Kispert (pictured below) says the chips are 45 percent faster than other competing NOR products from rivals such as Micron.

The new GL-S is two times faster than Spansion’s older products and 30 percent faster than rivals, based on third-party benchmark tests. Jim Handy, analyst at Objective Analytics, says the new chip family shows that the company’s technology has room to grow and that Spansion is executing well.

Spansion began working on the new product about 18 months ago, shortly after Kispert became CEO. But the company had high debt just as the big recession hit in 2008. It filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2009, laid off some employees, and transferred many of them to new owners when it sold off overseas manufacturing. The company has 3,500 employees now, compared to 9,000 before the bankruptcy. It exited unprofitable markets and focused on embedded products, or those in gadgets, game devices, medical, networking, cars or smart grid meters. In a car, for instance, the digital displays on the dashboard — which replace the old analog needles on speedometers and other instruments — use a lot of flash memory.

Since emerging from bankruptcy in May, 2010, the company has recovered along with the overall economy. It still has manufacturing facilities in Austin, Texas, and has dramatically improved its financial performance and balance sheet. Spansion is hiring again. Revenue has been growing for five quarters and the company has regained market share in the embedded market where it is focused. The company is still reporting breakeven results, but that’s partly related to a re-valuation of company assets during bankruptcy, and losses are declining. On a non-GAAP basis, the company is making money.

It’s still not completely out of the woods. It has $354 million in cash and is generating more each quarter, but debt is at $450 million. That would seem scary, but Kispert says the company has an advantage with its “charge trapping” nonvolatile memory technology. That technology enables cheaper, more flexible chips with a variety of paths for expansion. The company is partnering with another chip maker to apply the same tricks to NAND memory later this year.

The company has 2,000 employees in a factory in Austin that Kispert says is running “white-hot.” Kispert says, “That’s a testament to our determination.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is trying to disrupt the hard disk business via chip-based flash memory, which can handle tasks much faster than hard disks, but traditionally have been too expensive. As the costs come down, flash is getting more competitive. Investors in the round include Toshiba and Juniper Networks, as well as unnamed financial investors.

Hard disks are now the dominant storage devices in the vast arrays in big corporate data centers. But Violin Memory argues that its improvements in both flash memory and input-output systems enable it to achieve cost parity with hard drives. And it argues that its patent-pending technology also offers 10 times better performance.

The technology is now it its third generation of products. The Violin Memory 3200 Flash Memory Array can do a storage task in two hours that once took 12 using hard drive arrays. The Violin 3200 arrays can use thousands of flash memory chips in a single storage system. About 140 terabytes worth of memory can fit in a rack, with performance reaching 3 million input-output operations per second.

Violin launched its first generation of memory arrays in 2009. Each new generation lowers the cost of a system further, making it more cost effective than hard disk drive arrays. Violin Memory uses RAID protected flash memory chips, which means they are reliable enough that they can be used as primary storage for any file and operating system.

As more and more computing moves into the cloud, corporations need more reliable storage. (Imagine, for instance, if Facebook lost all of your photos. You wouldn’t be very happy). That’s why this type of memory solution will become more popular in the future. Toshiba recently invested an undisclosed amount in the company. Violin Memory has raised $110 million since it was founded in 2005.

Executives at both Toshiba and Juniper said that Violin Memory is a leader in high-end chip storage, which will play a bigger and bigger role in offloading storage from servers in cloud computing infrastructure. Don Basile, chief executive of Violin Memory, said the company is looking at a record year in 2011. The company’s customers include AOL, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. Rivals include Fusion-io, Seagate, and others. Violin Memory has more than 100 employees.

While financial institutions could benefit from the use of flash memory in their data centers, so can a lot of other enterprises that need power efficient computing boosts. (See yesterday’s story on the growth of flash in data centers). With more efficient computing, companies can reduce power consumption, cut cooling expenses, and eliminate expensive storage solutions.

Flash memory is particularly important in algorithmic trading services, which use computers to decide what trades to execute and when to do them. The speed of the transactions depends on the average time it takes to save the data from temporary memory to permanent memory. Flash memory speeds that process by placing data closer to the processor that needs it the most. A single ioMemory module has the capacity of 100 traditional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) memory modules and the performance of 1,000 hard disk drives.

Marinela Tudoran, a tech executive at Credit Suisse, says that Fusion-io’s flash memory products will become more and more popular thanks to advantages in speed, capacity, endurance and simplicity. The Fusion-io products are memory modules that can be added into servers housed in racks within a big data center.

Fusion-io says its performance increases range from three times to 10 times, depending on the application. Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io, a veteran of the DEMO conference, was founded in 2006 and has more than 300 employees. The company was started by David Flynn and Rick White. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak serves as its chief scientist.