Coho Data, the first provider of software-defined networking integrated storage appliances for high performance at cloud-scale, today announced it has closed a $25 million Series B funding. The round was led by new investor, Ignition Partners, and included existing investor, Andreessen Horowitz. The funds will accelerate Coho Data's R&D and go-to-market efforts as the company prepares for general availability of Coho DataStream later this year.

Coho Data emerged from stealth just last month to unveil the industry's first usage of software-defined networking in a hybrid flash appliance with the Coho DataStream 1000, designed to deliver 18x the performance of traditional storage and 2x the price/performance of all-flash array. The company offers all of this at public cloud pricing so businesses of all sizes can benefit from flash for less than they spend on traditional disk arrays today.

'Flash technology has been limited to point use cases to date, but with Coho Data's approach to using commodity hardware for cloud economics and its innovative use of software-defined networking integration for reliable scale, we believe flash's full potential for mainstream datacenter usage is finally being unlocked,' said Frank Artale, Managing Director from Ignition Partners and latest addition to Coho Data's Board of Directors. 'Having known this experienced and innovative leadership team for many years, I'm thrilled to be joining the board and excited to support Coho Data's growth.'

'Storage is the final battleground in the datacenter, with expensive, outdated monolithic storage vendors fending off the advances of dozens of storage startups. Nearly all of these new product offerings are simply packaging flash technology into similar architectures with limited scalability and narrow applicability,' explained Ramana Jonnala, CEO and Co-Founder of Coho Data. 'The Coho Data team believes that building a fundamentally different cloud-inspired software stack based on our experience developing the Xen hypervisor for Amazon is what will change storage in private clouds. With our unique use of software-defined networking to eliminate bottlenecks that flash creates in traditional arrays, flash will finally be able to be used in an efficient way to add value for any application at any scale.'

'It's amazing to see what Coho Data has accomplished in the year since we funded their Series A,' reflected Peter Levine, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. 'The team has rebuilt the entire storage array to support the most demanding hyper-scale environments with new software and integrated networking to offer the fastest, most scalable storage system in the market. Coho Data is poised to create significant disruption in ways predecessors have not been able to, and we're honored to be with the company every step of the way.'

About Coho Data
Coho Data is delivering storage for the cloud generation. Led by a team of XenSource/Citrix virtualization and storage industry veterans, Coho Data is enabling businesses of all sizes to build their own high performance Amazon-style storage for their data. Inspired by the highly scalable, commodity-hardware based approaches of public clouds, the company is developing the first flash-tuned scale-out storage architecture designed for the private cloud that delivers unparalleled performance at public cloud capacity pricing.

Founded in 2011 and funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Coho Data has offices in Vancouver, British Columbia and Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit http://www.cohodata.com and follow us on Twitter at @cohodata.

Coho Data and Coho DataStream are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Coho Data in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.