NVMe-oF Tech Startup Pavilion Data Bags $25M Funding

The new funding is slated to help bring Pavilion Data's NVMe over Fabric technology, based on its Hyperparallel platform that allows both high storage performance and fast drive rebuilds, reach a wider range of channel partners and customers.

Pavilion Data Systems, a pioneer in the development of NVMe over Fabric storage technology, this week closed a series C funding round that brought the company $25 million to expand its technology, channel, and international presence.

With the new round, led by Taiwan-based Taiwania Capital Management and Palo Alto, Calif.-based RPS Ventures, total funding in Pavilion Data Systems has reached $58 million.

Pavilion Data has been shipping product for about a year, sales of which are 100-percent led by or fulfilled by channel partners, said Walt Hinton, head of marketing for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

[Related: The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2019 (So Far)]

Pavilion Data's NVMe-oF technology was purpose-built to utilize current and future memory-class media. The company in May unveiled version 2.2 of its Pavilion Data platform which features increased read performance to up to 120 GBs-per-second, write performance to as high as 90 GBs-per-second, and write latency as low as 40 microseconds using RAID-6 protection. The platform includes a suite of data management capabilities including thin provisioning, snapshots, and data at rest encryption.

The company's Hyperparallel flash array platform also offers what it calls fast SWARM recovery for RAID rebuilds and consistency groups for snapshots, Hinton told CRN. With SWARM, a single SSD can be rebuilt at a rate of under 5 minutes per terabyte versus the more typical 25 minutes per terabyte, he said.

"Today's traditional arrays can't peep up with performance requirements, and DAS (direct attach storage) is hard to manage at scale," he said.

The flash drive build rate will become a major issue going forward, Hinton said. "Customers want NVMe, and the price of the NAND memory is falling," he said. "Manufacturers won't make smaller drives. But as those larger drives come to market, DAS systems won't work because recovering data from a failure takes too long."

Unlike traditional arrays with two flash controllers that can typically manage the equivalent of six NVMe drives, Pavilion Data's Hyperparallel platform can have up to 20 active-active controllers to support up to 1 petabyte of capacity in a 4U footprint, Hinton said.

Pavilion Data ships the chassis and controllers, and channel partners can either use source their own flash drives or purchase via the company, he said. "If partners have their own volume sourcing agreements, they can make better margins," he said.

Pavilion Data's customers fall into four primary categories, including webscale, financial services, scale-out government research, and media and entertainment, Hinton said.

"If you look horizontally across these categories, we're seeing a focus on storage analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning, he said.

Part of the new funding will be used to help Pavilion Data increase its reach into channel partners with deep expertise in the four primary business types, Hinton said. "The partner value-add is in integration and help with fine tuning," he said.

Part of the funding will also be used to expand Pavilion Data's international reach. The company already has customers in North America and Europe. "The lead investor, Taiwania Capital, has as its main focus helping bring vendors to Asia," Hinton said.