The Internet of Things is driving demand for cost-effective storage solutions that deliver both capacity and performance, according to Rob Commins, the vice president of Tegile. The executive told us that his company’s hybrid arrays marry the benefits of solid-state and traditional disk to “reduce capacity requirements while driving performance integrity.”

Tegile’s value proposition has not gone unnoticed by enterprises. The vendor doubled its revenue in the last three months, an unprecedented growth rate that earned it an additional $35 million in funding from Meritech Capital Partners, August Capital, SanDisk and Western Digital Capital. The latter is a subsidiary of the company that owns Tegile’s largest storage supplier.

Emerging players such as Tegile are putting the heat on traditional enterprise vendors. Database behemoth Oracle recently entered the hybrid market with the ZFS, a storage appliance designed for database backup of heavy-duty transactional workloads. Wikibon co-founder David Floyer concluded that the “ZFS appliance is indeed a true hybrid, allowing high continuous read and write rates with sustained low latency.” He added that “this makes it suitable for high performance streaming workloads such as Oracle database backups. Notably, true to form, Oracle has integrated it closely with RMAN, Oracle’s backup function and other Oracle features such as Hybrid Columnar Compression.”

SSD titan Fusion-io has also jumped on the hybrid bandwagon. In April, the vendor shelled out $119 million for NexGen Storage, a Louisville, Colorado-based provider of flash augmented disk arrays. The startup, which had secured $12 in funding prior to the buyout, uses Fusion-io’s SSDs in its n5 systems.

Fusion-io co-founder John Spiers said that NexGen will serve as a central pillar of his company’s long term strategy. He stated that the acquisition represents a “new beginning rather than the end” for both firms.