Storage startup Coho Data has raised US$25m in its second funding round, the company announced earlier this week. The startup, which came out of stealth in October, says it plans to bring to market later this year a hybrid storage array that combines flash and disk media and uses advanced management software to optimize performance.

The new funding round included the company's previous investor, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and a new one, Ignition Partners. Coho said it will use the funds to accelerate its R&D and go-to-market efforts.

The pitch for the startup's DataStream 1000 appliance is high performance at a much lower cost than all-flash arrays'. Coho says it is using software defined networking technology to eliminate I/O bottlenecks flash arrays are known for.

Frank Artale, a managing director at Ignition Partners and newcomer to the Coho board of directors, said, “Flash technology has been limited to point use cases to date, but with Coho Data’s approach to using commodity hardware for cloud economics and its innovative use of software-defined networking integration for reliable scale, we believe flash’s full potential for mainstream data center usage is finally being unlocked.”

Coho CEO and co-founder Ramana Jonnala said expensive and outdated monolithic storage vendors were fighting dozens of startups on the “final battleground” in the data center market. “Nearly all of these new product offerings are simply packaging flash technology into similar architectures with limited scalability and narrow applicability,” Jonnala said.

“The Coho Data team believes that building a fundamentally different cloud-inspired software stack based on our experience developing the Xen hypervisor for Amazon is what will change storage in private clouds. With our unique use of software-defined networking to eliminate bottlenecks that flash creates in traditional arrays, flash will finally be able to be used in an efficient way to add value for any application at any scale.”