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back to article The down low on why Coho Data is a no-go

Compute-assisted storage array startup Coho Data has shut up shop. Coho Data was founded in 2011 by CEO Ramana Jonnala, CTO Andrew Warfield and chief architect Keir Fraser. It picked up $65m in funding in three rounds, the third one being for $30m in 2015. Andrew Warfield notified friends that it had closed down on August 29 …

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  1. Platypus

    Third Mover Advantage

    Coho ran into an all-too-common problem for storage startups: storage customers are hard to evangelize. They have pressing, immediate problems. They want solutions to those problems, and ideally solutions that fit into their current paradigm. Getting them to look forward to the *next* set of problems is really really hard. Coho had looked ahead, seen a problem on the horizon, developed some interesting technology to address it ... and then found themselves too far ahead of the customers to get any revenue out of all that. Like other technologies (*ahem* CDP) it will be not the originators but some late-arriving copycats who hit the right market window to benefit. With luck, some of the people who actually had the vision and made the efforts will get to ride the gravy train a few years from now, but in my experience that happens all too rarely.

    9 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who knows what it did.

    Who knows why it did it.

    Who cares now it's gone.

    4 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      I wonder which storage startup will be next to fail?

      Nimble was once flying high but in the end they couldn't make it into the big time and got acquired by the only company who expressed an interest, HPE, for "only" about a billion. Tintri had a lackluster IPO and still has a sub-$200m market cap. Tegile is getting acquired by WD for who knows how much (or how little?).

      And now Coho Data (which I had honestly forgotten even existed) is gone.

      Who's next? Place yer bets!

      3 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Kaminario - I reckon they'll be next.

        0 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    because it was slow

    as an ex Coho Data employee I can tell you that CD had a few short comings but the primary one that I saw/experience was that it was based on a distributed file system that added unnecessary latency into the storage stack that was a hybrid and then an all flash system. so even though they had an all flash box it was still slower than other hybrids and legacy all disks arrays on the market, how can you compete like that...

    3 0 Reply
  4. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    ching!

    Looks like someone made some money out of the failure ... OK, time to move on to a new startup.

    1 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ultra niche is not a good strategy right now for storage which is becoming increasingly commoditized.

    agree that they solved and interesting problem....that is really hard for a lot of people to understand why they even have that problem or why they need another vendor to solve it opposed to other vendors (the answer was apparently that you don't).

    Storage doesn't need to be hard to understand and consume. this is an example of an org that may have done some interesting things in the storage start up feature set wars circa 2011-2014.

    Missed the boat and left in the cold after the 2015-2016 mass industry consolidations, cloud adoptions, and flash centric vendors who are now the still current market leaders in storage (and always were).

    1 0 Reply

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