Skyera, a maker of high-end solid-state drives, has received strategic funding from Western Digital Corp as part of its recently announced series B round of financing. Western Digital Capital co-invested in the $51 million round as an extension of the strategic relationship between the two companies that also includes joint technology development. Western Digital had previously funded Skyera as its initial outside investor.

“The backing of Western Digital has enabled us to ramp our business across marketing, sales and engineering which has been instrumental in creating the industry’s most innovative solid-state solution,” said Radoslav Danilak, chief executive officer of Skyera.

Skyera designs advanced high-end solid-state storage solutions aimed at enterprise customers. Its most advanced system is called Skyhawk. Skyera’s SkyHawk series of enterprise solid-state storage systems, priced at an industry breakthrough price point of less than $3 per gigabyte, mark the first time that the latest generation 19/20nm solid-state technology can be used as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise hard disk-based systems.

“With our SkyHawk family of enterprise solid-state storage systems we are witnessing the next era of solid-state storage and I strongly believe that having a close working relationship with Western Digital, the world’s top disk drive vendor, is invaluable as we set out to reshape the storage landscape,” added Mr.Danilak.

Skyera's Skyhawk system uses more than 3000 Micron NAND flash storage components to create a high-capacity, high-performance 44TB storage solution that fits into an industry standard 1U form factor. Skyhawk can consume up to 750W, but it delivers whopping 3.6GB/s of bandwidth as well as up to 1 million input/output operations per second. Micron's 20nm monolithic 128Gb device was the first in the industry to enable 1Tb of data storage in a single fingertip-size package (thanks to stacking of eight dies). It is currently in mass production and shipping to numerous customers for use in a variety of storage applications.

“One of our primary goals in developing strategic relationships with technology innovators in the broader storage ecosystem is to enable customers to develop highly optimized storage solutions that meet their changing data management needs. We see companies like Skyera as offering a dramatic improvement over traditional approaches to emerging storage challenges. We will continue to support innovation by collaborating with customers and partners, and investing in companies who are addressing today’s most exciting storage opportunities,” said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer of Western Digital.  

Skyera’s SkyHawk solid-state solution has received industry acclaim as a visionary and innovative product, substantiating Skyera’s approach to mainstream enterprise solid-state storage. Its SeOS solid-state operating system combines hardware, storage and data management into a unified solution that provides top performance, cost and power consumption attributes.

Tags: WD, Skyera, Western Digital, Business, SSD, NAND, Flash, Micron, 20nm, Skyhawk