PernixData
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Technology, Software |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founder | Poojan Kumar, Satyam Vaghani |
| Defunct | 2016 |
| Fate | Acquired by Nutanix |
| Headquarters | San Jose , United States |
Area served | Global |
Key people | Poojan Kumar (CEO), Satyam Vaghani (CTO) |
| Products | PernixData FVP |
PernixData was a technology firm located in San Jose, California, established in 2012 and later acquired in 2016. Its flagship solution, PernixData FVP, provided virtualization software for server-side flash memory and random-access memory (RAM).
History
In February 2012, PernixData was launched by co-founders Poojan Kumar, who served as CEO, and Satyam Vaghani, the CTO. The company’s initial capital was provided by Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with individual contributions from Mark Leslie (founding chairman and CEO of Veritas), John Thomson (CEO of Virtual Instruments and a board member at Microsoft), and Lane Bess (COO of Zscaler and former CEO at Palo Alto Networks). A subsequent funding round took place in May 2013, bringing in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers alongside the original investors.
By August 2014, PernixData secured Series C funding led by Menlo Ventures, attracting existing backers as well as new investors such as Marc Benioff (chairman and CEO of Salesforce), Jim Davidson (Silver Lake Partners), and Steve Luczo (chairman and CEO of Seagate Technology).
The company debuted its FVP software in August 2013. In July 2016, acquisition rumors emerged, culminating in the purchase of PernixData by Nutanix the following month.
Products and competition
PernixData FVP is designed to virtualize server-side flash memory and random-access memory (RAM), enabling storage performance scaling separate from capacity expansion. Initially released in 2013, FVP supported only VMware’s cloud platform vSphere 5, with intentions to extend compatibility to other hypervisor environments such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
The launch of Version 2.0 in August 2014 introduced multiple editions—Enterprise, Standard, VDI, and Essentials Plus—and incorporated RAM pooling to improve flash caching functionality.
Within the VMware-centric flash virtualization market, principal competitors included Virtunet Systems’ VirtuCache, SanDisk’s FlashSoft, Proximal Data’s Autocache, and VMware’s own vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC). Both PernixData’s FVP and Virtunet’s VirtuCache distinguished themselves by offering write caching and clustering capabilities not available in VMware’s vFRC.