Western Digital reinvests in enterprise solid state drive maker Skyera

Shawn Knight

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Western Digital is lending a helping hand to Skyera in the form of strategic funding as part of a recently announced Series B round of financing. The duo said the investment is part of a strategic relationship that also includes joint technology development. This marks the second time Western Digital has invested in Skyera as they were the initial outside investor early on.

Skyera will use the money to ramp up production across marketing, sales and engineering, the company said in a joint press release. The money is part of a $51.6 million round of funding led by Dell Ventures.

western digital ssd skyera

Skyera says their skyHawk series of enterprise solid state drive storage systems are the first to use 19/20nm technology as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise hard disk systems. The company’s SSD systems are priced at less than $3 per gigabyte, a breakthrough price point according to Skyera.

Western Digital president and chief executive officer Steve Milligan said one of the goals in developing strategic relationships with technology innovators is to enable customers to create highly optimized storage solutions that meet their ever-changing data storage needs.

It’s interesting to see Western Digital investing in solid state drive technology at a time when they haven’t really embraced flash storage on their own. The company does offer a few drives as part of their SiliconDrive series but none of these are geared towards the average consumer. Given Skyera’s focus on enterprise solutions, we don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

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