Kaminario Bags $53M Funding, Plans To Expand Marketing And Channel Efforts

All-flash storage array developer Kaminario this week unveiled a round of funding worth $53 million, giving the company plenty of room to expand its marketing and support programs and build its channel partner base.

Newton, Mass.-based Kaminario also said it has added always-on data encryption to its all-flash storage arrays as a way to protect customers' data.

With the new E-round of funding, Kaminario has now raised a total of $128 million, said Founder and CEO Dani Golan.

[Related: Kaminario Brings Enterprise-Class Software, Scale-Up To Flash Storage Arrays]

However, that may not be enough to take Kaminario towards profitability, Golan told CRN. "It secures our planning for years to come," he said. "It was a significant round. We feel that at the moment, it will allow us to achieve our goals. But we feel we can do another round if needed. We'll know in the future if we will have to do it."

Kaminario is also not yet a cash-flow positive business, Golan said. "It's not our goal now," he said. "Our goal is to continue our rapid expansion. If cash-flow positive was our goal, we could have achieved it. This is a rare opportunity to build a new market."

Kaminario has already built a partner base which includes about 70 solution providers in the U.S., according to Golan. "We're focused on VARs that are solution-oriented, and not just selling storage," he said. "We want those with database or application or server practices. And we love regional VARs who can move real fast with us."

The new round of funding is an exciting move for Kaminario, said Tom Mumford, CEO, CTO, and co-founder of Triaxis, a Manchester, Conn.-based solution provider and Kaminario channel partner.

"The big round of funding tells me that resources that until now have been tight will be less tight," Mumford told CRN. "It means 2015 should be a kick-ass year."

When Triaxis started working with Kaminario, Mumford was worried about the physical footprint of the Kaminario solution. "Pure Storage had a much smaller footprint. But I read that Kaminario has the fastest storage on the planet even though its controllers look old-fashioned."

One Kaminario partner who asked to remain anonymous said his company is not seeing a lot of traction for all-flash storage arrays.

NEXT: All-flash Vs. Hybrid Flash Arrays

"For the price customers pay, the question is, are you better off with all-flash arrays or hybrid flash and disk arrays," the solution provider told CRN. "For about the same price, customers can get the same amount of flash capacity plus disk capacity for tier-2 and tier-3 storage."

Golan disputed the idea that all-flash storage is more expensive than hybrid flash arrays. He said Kaminario's all-flash array capacity is priced at about $2 per GB, which compares to about $4 to $5 per GB for legacy hybrid storage.

As for performance, Golan said hybrid flash storage arrays cannot keep up.

"When you have low utilization rates, with all data sitting in flash and not hitting hard drives often, hybrid array performance is OK," he said. "But when you fill the box and the algorithm needs to fetch data from hard drives, the service time is much higher. So hybrid arrays suffer from inconsistency."