Dollar Flows In The Storage Market This Week
By Joseph F. Kovar, CRN
Irvine, Calif.
11:37 AM EST Wed., Jan. 10, 2001
crn.com
If you think all the IT industry's 23-year-old pioneers and visionaries are
crying into their lattes about how their dot-coms dot-bombed, meet Thomas
Isakovich, the 23-year-old president and CEO of TrueSAN Networks, a
developer of SAN technology.
Isakovich can say something few entrepreneurs his age can,on Jan. 15 his
company is expected to disclose that it secured $30 million in second-round
funding.
The investment, which comes from several financial institutions, includes the
first venture funding from Fibre Channel adapter and switch vendor QLogic.
It will be used to fund product development and fuel company growth, says
Isakovich. TrueSAN's Paladin product offering is a modular, massively
scalable, distributed storage architecture aimed at building storage pools.
TrueSAN currently has about 50 employees, a number Isakovich expects to
double this year. That will help the company in its goal of taking on EMC
as the storage market leader, he says.
Is Isakovich aiming too high? Remember, Michael Dell was a college
student when he started on the road to unseat IBM.
The TrueSAN second round represents just one of four recent investment
moves in the storage industry.
Among them, CommVault Systems, an Oceanport, N.J.-based data storage
management software vendor, last week scored its second mezzanine round.
CommVault executives say the company raised $33.6 million in funding
from several financial institutions, as well as a storage vendor that was not
identified. The company plans to use this to expand distribution and
marketing efforts for its Galaxy Enterprise 2000 storage management software
suite.
Instead of settling for investing in part of a company,Maxoptix, a Fremont,
Calif.-based vendor of optical storage devices, on Tuesday bought all of Breece Hill Technologies, a supplier of
entry-level through enterprise-class automated loaders and libraries.
The acquisition makes Maxoptix a supplier of technology representing a wide range of acronyms, including MO,
DVD-RAM, SuperDLT, LTO and AIT libraries.
Meanwhile, Exabyte, also a manufacturer of tape libraries, unloaded part of its business.
The Boulder, Colo., company on Monday spun off 66 percent of CreekPath Systems, a storage service provider (SSP)
formed last year. The move came two weeks after closing a $17 million round of funding, says Greg Mangold, vice
president of sales and marketing.
The spinoff came about in part to free the parent company from the need to fund the SSP, says Mangold. "We've been
drawing from Exabyte funds for payroll, etc.," Mangold says. "Exabyte has their own issues."
CreekPath will use the funding to demonstrate and further develop its technology, which Mangold says is aimed at
helping service providers provide IT services to their customers. |
