Mangstor gets a nice chunk of go-to-market B-round money

NVMe flash card and fabric flash array startup Mangstor has gained $10.2m in B-round funding to build out its market-facing infrastructure worldwide, and head towards a 2016 IPO.

The company has MX6300 NVMe PCIe flash cards, using its own firmware/hardware controller technology, and NX6320 flash arrays using these cards and accessed by an NVMe fabric interface which eliminates external array network latency and provides SAN facilities on what is effectively DAS (Direct-Accessed Storage) in attached host servers.

The flash cards outperform any other PCIe flash cards available and the array blows all other all-flash arrays away, in terms of access latency and bandwidth.

Mangstor claims it is the only vertically-integrated flash array vendor, from flash chips to system level, with product available today.

The funding was led by New Science Ventures, and partner Vivek Mohindra was pretty enthused about Mangstor’s tech, even taking into account he’d just ploughed millions into the company, using words such as "unprecedented" and "incredible":

MX6300 latency and IOPS performance from Tweaktown.

Mangstor’s team and the flash networked storage technologies it has developed are poised to enable unprecedented advances across industries where real-time data analysis is critical.

We see incredible potential for them in applications ranging from data bases, big data analysis, streaming data, and all high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

The cash “will be used to fuel growth in leadership, sales and engineering roles as well as to fund product and technology development.”

Because its controller is software-driven it can quickly adopt new chip technology underneath and provide application-specific optimisations for host servers running particular applications, such as incoming video stream inspection.

Mangstor is setting up distribution in Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Bob Richards has been hired as Director for Europe and will be setting up distribution channels, with John Vaines’s Diamond Point International onboard for the UK.

If you believe that the future of primary data-holding external array connectivity is NVMe fabrics then Mangstor has the hottest technology available today and a head start on everybody else, including EMC's DSSD operation. We’ll be writing a backgrounder on Mangstor soon. ®