Pliant Technology Raises $15 Million in Series C Funding to Drive Volume Production...

Pliant Technology Raises $15 Million in Series C Funding to Drive Volume
Production of New Enterprise Flash Drives

New Class of Solid State Storage Devices Provides Unparalleled I/O
Performance, Reliability and Green Advantages for Data Centers and
High-Performance Computing

MILPITAS, Calif., March 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Pliant Technology, developer of
Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of high-performance solid state
storage devices for the enterprise, today announced that it has received $15
million in Series C funding. Pliant's EFDs are designed to deliver
dramatically higher levels of I/O performance while meeting the growing need
for increased energy efficiency and reliability in enterprise computing
environments.

Pliant plans to use the Series C funding as working capital to support the
volume production ramp-up of its first EFD solutions. The company will also
leverage the funding to begin expanding its EFD product portfolio. Pliant
began delivery of initial EFD units to major OEMs in late 2008.

Pliant's Series C funding round includes the addition of Menlo Ventures, one
of the world's largest VC firms focusing on the information technology sector,
and managing director Mark A. Siegel has joined Pliant's board of directors.

"Pliant has generated substantial interest among the industry's top system and
storage server OEMs," said Siegel. "The ability of Pliant's leadership team
to raise this amount of funding underscores the tremendous value its advanced
EFD technology can offer enterprise data centers, including dramatic I/O
performance gains, as well as significant reductions in energy consumption and
IT costs."

Other leading VC firms investing in the Series C round, as well as in previous
rounds, include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Arcturus Capital, and Divergent
Ventures.

"We are delighted to have Menlo Ventures join the group of leading investors
that continue to support our efforts to bring the first EFDs to market," said
Amyl Ahola, CEO of Pliant Technology. "We continue to meet all key product
and company milestones, and we are well on track to begin volume production of
our first EFDs."

"Solid state storage technologies will have a significant impact in data
centers over the next two to three years, particularly when it comes to
meeting ever-increasing I/O performance requirements," said Mark Peters,
senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Wherever users need
additional speed or extreme throughput performance - such as for database
acceleration, Web services or finance operations - solid state is becoming a
perfect choice. But not all solid state is born equal - Pliant's
implementation has been developed to deliver ultra-high I/O performance, as
well as to further mitigate the reliability and cost question-marks that have
been restricting the adoption rate of SSDs into the enterprise. As such, its
innovation positions Pliant to be a significant contributor to driving the
mainstream enterprise adoption of flash storage."

Pliant's EFD solution provides more performance and lower energy consumption
than multiple traditional high-performance hard drives for enterprise
computing environments, and is designed to take advantage of the ultra-high
data transfer capabilities of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface technology.
Strategically deploying EFDs within enterprise IT data center environments
enables IT managers to meet I/O performance requirements with greater
flexibility, while eliminating the energy and cost burden resulting from the
common practice of "over-provisioning" disk drives. The EFD approach can
slash data center energy consumption significantly, by up to 80 percent in
many cases, and Pliant's EFDs fit seamlessly into the existing storage
infrastructure.

About Pliant Technology
Pliant Technology is developing Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of
solid state storage devices that integrate seamlessly into enterprise
information systems and dramatically improve performance, reliability, energy
efficiency, and TCO. Pliant's EFDs deliver breakthrough improvements over
today's highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of
data I/O intensive enterprise applications. The company was founded by a team
of successful storage executives and engineers from Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor,
Seagate, Quantum, and Conner. Pliant is based in Milpitas, Calif. More
information is available at www.plianttechnology.com.

Pliant Blog - Enterprise Storage Sense:
http://blog.enterprisestoragesense.com/

Contact:
Sara Lee
Walt & Company
408-369-7200 ext. 2980
slee@walt.com

SOURCE Pliant Technology

Sara Lee of Walt & Company, +1-408-369-7200 ext. 2980, slee@walt.com, for
Pliant Technology