Nantero raised a $21 million round from investors. The company is one of StorageMojo’s favorite NVRAM vendors, because carbon nanotubes.

I also like the fact that their process can use existing fabs, even fully depreciated ones, to build high-density vertical NVRAM. The business model takes after ARM rather than Intel, which means they can harness the R&D budgets of multiple firms.

I usually skip the boilerplate quotes in press releases, but this one from the round’s lead, David Poltack, Managing Director, Globespan Capital Partners, is on the money:

Nantero has multiple industry-leading customers who would like to receive NRAM even sooner. The fact that several of these customers, as well as key partners in the ecosystem, have decided to also invest in Nantero is a strong sign of confidence given how well they know Nantero and its product from years of working together.

The StorageMojo take
NVRAM is the Next Big Thing in storage. StorageMojo expects that it will have a much greater impact of systems and storage than NAND flash has had over the past decade.

Why? Flash added a new level to the storage pyramid and made IOPS cheap. NVRAM will rearchitect the storage pyramid, possibly replacing RAM, flash and, depending on cost, disk, with a single flat address space. Since CPUs aren’t getting faster, learning how to best integrate NVRAM will be the next big battle on the performance front.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.