Violin was the subject of two Bloomberg stories last week. Last Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Violin had quietly filed its initial public offering (IPO) to become a public company. No surprise there. Violin is heavily funded with more than $150 million, and CEO Don Basile has talked of going public for months. Bloomberg followed that on Friday by reporting that HP is ending a reseller deal with Violin that has been in place for Violin Memory Arrays (VMAs) since 2010. HP indicated it doesn’t need Violin because its sells all-flash models of its flagship 3PAR storage array.

Losing the HP stream of revenue could damage Violin’s IPO plans. Violin has not commented on the IPO filing but a Violin spokeswoman released a statement about “rumors and speculation floating around” concerning the HP deal.

According to Violin:

“The current HP Violin relationship remains unchanged. The VMA product family (the Violin 3000 and vSHARE software) continue to be available to customers via HP as per the announced relationship. HP engineering continues to certify the VMA with additional servers, operating systems and joint selling and promotions. POC (proof of concepts) are currently active as are additional HP certifications.

“HP has stated 3PAR is the long term strategic direction for their company. Violin offers other products like the Violin 6000 through both our direct sales and our global reseller network as well as other software and system vendors which have been announced over the past 12 months.”

HP’s response was not exactly warm and friendly towards Violin. An HP spokesman answered Violin’s claim by saying “HP 3PAR is our strategic platform for solid-state storage.” That was the same statement that appeared in the Bloomberg story Friday. If HP wanted to back track, its response would have been more elaborate.

Another source familiar with HP’s strategy said the original reseller deal is still in place but HP will not extend it. It will, however, honor the deal if customers want to buy a Violin array from HP.

Reading between the lines tells me HP will strongly pitch a 3PAR solid-state array before selling anything from Violin. The reseller deal remains in place, but a reseller deal on paper means nothing if the company that is supposed to do the reselling ignores it.

The D funding round brings Pure’s total to $95 million. Index Ventures led the round with previous investors Greylock Partners, Redpoints Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures contributing. Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi joins Pure’s board and will serve as a strategic adviser.

“We weren’t hurting for money, but frankly our market is happening and opening up quickly,” Pure’s VP of marketing Matt Kixmoeller said. “We’re just ready to hit the gas pedal.”

Kixmoeller said the funding will be used to expand marketing into Europe and Asia, and to accelerate the startup’s product roadmap. “We’ll be hiring aggressively,” he said.

The money can come in handy. The all-flash storage competition has greatly expanded since Pure first came out of stealth with its FlashArray platform a year ago. Just this week, two more vendors joined the fray – Skyera came out of stealth and Tegile Systems added an all-flash system to go with its hybrid arrays.

They join a list that includes Violin Memory, Nimbus Data, Kaminario, Whiptail, Texas Memory Systems, Greenbytes and SolidFire. And that doesn’t include the major storage vendors, who mostly sell hybrid systems now but are moving into all-flash either in their legacy platforms (Hewlett-Packard’s LeftHand and 3PAR flash arrays) or with new technology (EMC with its XtremIO acquisition).

Pure, which built its arrays from the ground up for flash, will announce its second-generation software capabilities by the end of the month, according to Kixmoeller.

Violin has pulled in $150 million in funding since former Fusion-io CEO Don Basile became Violin’s CEO in late 2009. Basile said Violin has grown from 100 employees to 320 since last June, and sales increased 500% over the last year. He puts Violin’s valuation at $800 million, which is probably more than 10 times its annual revenue.

Violin likes to bring in funding money from strategic investors as well as venture capitalists. Violin’s NAND supplier Toshiba has been an investor since the first funding round, and joined SAP as the largest investors in this latest round. Previous investor Juniper Networks and newcomer Highland Capital Partners were other investors in today’s round.

“We’re getting in the habit of this,” Basile said after closing his fourth funding round at Violin. “At the end of last year we considered the public market, but our bankers weren’t sure if the public market was open in the first quarter of 2012, so we took a mezzanine round. This gives us money to grow and operate regardless of market decisions.”

Violin sells all-flash storage arrays and caching appliances. Basile points to EMC’s VFCache PCIe caching product and its plans for a Project Thunder flash-based shared storage appliance that will compete with Violin as proof that the enterpreise flash market is poised to take off.

By Basile’s count, there are at least 30 companies selling all-flash arrays now, although he said Violin mostly competes with traditional storage vendors offering solid-state drives mixed in their hard drive arrays. Solid-state storage companies raised more than $300 million in funding in 2011, and have also been prime acquisition targets. “

Violin acquired the assets of Gear6 in 2010, and turned the technology into its vCache NFS Caching product. Basile said some of Violin’s latest funding may be used for small acquisitions to enhance its product line. “We’re an active reviewer of companies,” he said. “Expect us to acquire things that make sense to buy rather than engineer from the ground up.”