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Baidu flash-card supplier Memblaze pockets extra funds

Do flash fabrics beckon?

Chinese flash-card startup Memblaze has raised tens of millions of dollars in a C-round of funding, giving it the wherewithal to further develop its PCIe flash tech.

According to Crunchbase Memblaze has had four funding events since being founded by CEO Xuebing Yin, CTO Lu Xiangfeng, and VP Marketing Zhibo Tang in 2011:

  • 2012 - $3.24m A-round
  • 2013 - $1.62m B-round
  • 2014 August - $20m C-round
  • 2015 December - undisclosed amount in a second part of the C-round.

We would estimate it has received around $30-35m in total funding. The CEO said about the C-round: "After this round of financing, we will continue to boost our investments in technology R&D, and attract more outstanding talents to join our company. In the meantime, we'll invest more in international market development, expand our sales channels, and strengthen our cooperation with international chip, server and solution manufacturers, among other suppliers, to jointly expand the international market."

The company says it has more than 200 enterprise customers, including the top 50 China hyperscale companies such as Baidu, Youku, Qihoo 360 and Tencent.

We wrote about Memblaze and its 4.8TB PBlaze3 PCIe flash card in October 2014. In May 2015 it launched a PBlaze4 card with 6.4TB maximum capacity (8TB raw), NVMe 1.1 support and hot-pluggability through the SFF-8639 standard. It uses Toshiba MLC NAND chips and stores metadata in a pseudo-SLC section of the drives.

Memblaze says psuedo-SLC (single-level cell or pSLC) is a variant of MLC (2-level cell or 2 bits/cell) which has the speed and durability of SLC flash.

We wouldn't be surprised if a faster and higher-capacity PBlaze 5 product was introduced in 2016, and an NVME SSD. It would be intetesting to know if Memblaze was active in evaluating 3D XPoint memory from Intel and Micron. With the funding it has received it may well move into adjacent areas, such as networked PCIe flash cards using NVMe fabrics.

A PBlaze4 datasheet can be accessed here (pdf). John Baskett is MemBlaze's VP for North America Business Development and Partnerships, and Memblaze contact details can be found here. ®

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