Ten-Year Old NextIO Closed Doors

"NextIO, Inc. ceased operations as of August 19, 2013 and executed a general assignment for the benefit of creditors. Please contact Geoff Berman or Jeff Gasbarra for more details. For more information please visit DSI Assignments." That’s the only sentence you can read now on the website of the company and nothing else. But you can access to the entire site at http://web.archive.org/web/20130103022218/http://www.nextio.com.

Born in January 2003, NextIO, based in Austin, TX, designed innovative PCIe I/O virtualization solutions with three products: vNET I/O Maestro consolidation and virtualization appliances, vCORE GPU consolidation products, and vSTOR I/O acceleration appliances. Its most recent vNET I/O Maestro provides server connectivity at the rack level to both Ethernet and FC networks without the need for changes in governance models or proprietary, hard to support I/O drivers. The result was the elimination of expensive 10GbE NICs, FC HBA, multiple top-of-rack leaf switches, and "an up to 80% reduction in the number of cables at the back of the rack," said the company.

It targeted customers were in HPC, financial services, oil and gaz, government, and MSPs

Among its parners, there was Marvell to build a PCIe flash-based solutions for HPC and Fusion-io for PCIe SSDs. It was also an OEM of Texas Memory (acquired by IBM) to use RamSan flash in HPC.

Among its distribution agreement, there was:

• PNY in Europe and EMEA in 2010,
• Leadtek Research in AsiaPac and ELSA Japan in 2010
• Avnet in USA in 2011
• BellInfo and ISPark in Korea, Vertex in Hong Kong and Macau, Sugon in China in 2012, Computerlinks in UK and Ireland, KVINT in Kazakhstan, E-stor Technologies in China, AMT Group in Russia in 2012, and
• Promark Technology this year for North America

The defunct firm got around $75 million in several financial rounds, the last one being $12.3 million last year, with Dell among the investors.

According to an article from Austin American Statesman, NextIO shuts down and CEO and co-founder, K.C. Murphy, formerly at Broadcom, said the company was funding its operations through a loan, and the bank that held the loan asked for repayment, forcing the company’s shutdown. He expects the company will file for a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy in which the main asset will be its intellectual property.

Company’s sales collapsed late last year and it attempted to attract a buyer this year, but could not get a sale closed despite extensive negotiations with Dell and Samsung Electronics.

The firm had 70 employees at its peak last year, and was at about 35 employees when it ceased operations.