Samsung wants a bite of flash cache, will eat Proximal Data – sources

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Samsung is buying Proximal Data, a flash caching software company, people close to the situation told The Register, although no formal announcement has been made.

Proximal was founded in 2011 by CEO Rory Bolt, who was involved with Avamar and heavily involved in selling it to EMC for $165m. The company provides AutoCache, which places IO intelligence inside the ESXi hypervisor and also Hyper-V to enable it to cache hot data on a server-attached flash drive. As a result, virtual machines execute faster.

The funding history as listed by CrunchBase is:

• $3m in October 2012 — seed funding possibly


• $2m in March 2013 — A-round we think


• $2m B-round in April 2013 from Avalon Ventures and Divergent Ventures


• $1m also in April 2013

Proximal Data home page. Click to go there.

That makes a total of $8m, modest indeed in these days of hundred million dollar plus rounds in storage tech. A 5X exit would imply a $40m price.

Samsung gets itself a nice piece of flash read caching action, which it can sell alongside its server flash products, with one possibility being that it intends to develop the software to do write caching, as PernixData does.

Virtually every PCIe flash supplier now has its own flash caching software — the stuff's become a commodity.

We have left messages, both phone and email, with Proximal Data and will update this story as and when we hear more. Watch this space. ®

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