Tegile Systems, a provider of flash-driven storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, announced that it has closed a $70 million funding round.
The latest funding round brings the company’s total capital raised to $117.5 million to date, and will be used to finance its global expansion and address the enterprise flash storage market space.
Three new investors, Capricorn Investment Group, Cross Creek Advisors and Pine River Capital Management, join existing investors August Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Western Digital and SanDisk to fund the round.
“Businesses benefit from flash-driven storage by realizing the application acceleration it brings. For example, Tegile has a hedge fund customer that was running financial models at the close of the exchanges in New York that took 22 hours to process,” Rob Commins, vice president of marketing at Tegile, told eWEEK. “That’s far too long to have any impact before Hong Kong opens. By implementing Tegile’s all-flash solution, their data modeling process was cut down to 4 hours. This had a massive impact on their business. On the other side of the income statement, flash also has lower operating costs than rotating disk.”
Commins pointed out another example of a health care provider in the Midwest. By moving their electronic medical records (EMR) database to Tegile’s flash-driven storage, he said they are now able to see 46,000 more patients per year.
In the next 18 months, Tegile plans to double the number of employees from its current base of 300, scale up its operations, and further expand its reseller channel to satisfy the rising demand in Europe and Asia.
In North America, the company will continue to ramp its sales teams– Tegile runs 100 percent of its business with the channel.
“It is paramount to work with a strong network of partners that have trusted advisor relationships with their end user customers to enable our hyper growth,” Commins said.
He explained Tegile would both expand into metropolitan areas where it does not have coverage, as well as increase the number of sales teams in large metropolitan areas that cannot be covered by the existing sales footprint the company has today.
“Soon, the cost of flash will be very close to disk. Add in the operating cost advantages of flash, and flash will have the leg up in TCO. When this happens, the shift to flash will be even faster,” Commins said. “We will also see even faster flash technologies such as PCIe and NVDIMMs make their way into storage systems such as Tegile’s. Both of these developments will advance the price to performance advantages of flash.”
