Skyera hooks $51.6M from Dell Ventures to bring affordable SSDs to the enterprise

Enterprise solid-state drive maker Skyera has raised $51.6 million in its second round of funding, with hopes that it can make a dent in a crowded flash storage field.

Skyera wants to offer big enterprise companies super-fast storage for their data centers on the promise that its storage is affordable, has low power consumption, and will greatly boost software performance. Its flagship product, skyHawk, claims to deliver next-gen performance and density at a similar price point to high-end traditional spinning-disk hard drives. Basically, these are some of the cheapest SSDs you should be able to buy for your company’s data center.

Gartner projects the market for enterprise flash storage will grow from $393 million in 2012 to about $4.2 billion in 2016, so betting on this type of service isn’t a bad idea. That said, the market for enterprise SSDs is a little crowded, with EMC, Pure Storage, Nimble Storage, Violin Memory, Nimbus Data, NetApp, IBM, and SolidFire all trying to attract customers.

The new funding was led by Dell Ventures with participation from other unnamed investors. The $51.6 million actually includes $6.5 million from a prior investment from the same firms, but this is the first time the company has announced any funding numbers.

“We view the investment in Skyera as a validation of the disruptiveness of the technology we are bringing to enterprise organizations seeking to take advantage of both the technical and cost benefits of the latest generation of flash,” Skyera CEO Radoslav Danilak said in a statement. “Moreover, Dell and the investment syndicate bring deep knowledge of the storage sector that will be beneficial to Skyera as we take our next steps.”

Data center image via Shutterstock