PernixData

PernixData, founded in February 2012, was a software company that focused on storage virtualization, ultimately being acquired by Nutanix in August 2016. The company was established in San Jose, California, by Poojan Kumar, who served as CEO, and Satyam Vaghani, the CTO. The founders leveraged significant experience from VMware, where Kumar had led data products and Vaghani was the principal engineer and Storage CTO, responsible for creating VMware's clustered file system. Their shared background at VMware, and Kumar's earlier role co-founding Oracle Exadata, provided a strong foundation for addressing storage performance bottlenecks in virtualized environments.

The company's business model revolved around selling software licenses for its core products, which were distributed through a global network of over 650 resellers and a resale agreement with Dell. PernixData addressed the input/output (I/O) bottleneck that occurs when multiple virtual machines attempt to access a company's storage infrastructure simultaneously. Instead of costly hardware overhauls, PernixData developed a software-based solution to decouple storage performance from storage capacity.

PernixData's main product was the PernixData FVP (Flash Virtualization Platform), first released in August 2013. This software virtualizes server-side flash memory and RAM, creating a clustered, high-performance acceleration tier. It installed directly into the hypervisor kernel, allowing it to accelerate read and write workloads for any virtual machine without altering existing hardware. A key feature was its ability to pool flash and RAM resources from across multiple servers, making the aggregated performance tier accessible to any VM in the cluster. FVP supported write-back caching with fault tolerance to prevent data loss, and later versions introduced adaptive compression to increase the effective RAM capacity. The company also offered Architect, a software platform for storage management and infrastructure analytics.

The company secured multiple funding rounds, including a Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Series B from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a Series C led by Menlo Ventures, with notable individual investors also participating. In August 2016, Nutanix announced its acquisition of PernixData, aiming to integrate its data acceleration technology into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. The deal was reportedly valued at approximately $9.7 million. Keywords: storage virtualization, data acceleration, flash virtualization, server-side storage, VMware, hypervisor, FVP software, I/O bottleneck, Nutanix acquisition, enterprise cloud