History 2002: Storage Start-Up Alacritech

Start-ups profile:

Company: Alacritech, Inc., San Jose, CA

Birth date: 1997

Products: TCP/IP accelerators based on the company’s proprietary SLIC (Session Layer Interface Card) technology for network-attached devices

Executives: Larry Boucher, founder, president and CEO; Richard Blackborow, VP engineering; Barry Haaser, VP marketing; Russell Lait, VP operations; Dan Dunkel, VP WW sales

Employees: 40

Financial background: has completed 3 rounds of funding totaling $35 million, notably from Quantum Technology Ventures, Benchmark Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Alloy Ventures and Berkeley International Capital, Munder Capital Management, Needham Capital Partners.

Competitors: Adaptec, Platys, Intel, iVivity, LSI Logic, NetOctave, Siliquent Technologies, Silverback Systems, Trebia Networks, Wind River Systems Fab partner, TSMC

Known distributors: Bell Microproducts and Nissho Electronics

Our opinion
Boucher, a former founder of Auspex and CEO of Adaptec is a legend in the storage industry, authoring the initial specs of the SCSI interface in 1979 when he was with Shugart Associates. He was among the first to sense the future of iSCSI and the need for servers with PCI adapter card or NIC (Network Interface Card), to free the host CPU or storage devices from intensive SCSI and TCP/IP network protocols processing. The company has already released 2 products, the 100×2 dual-port server adapter ($299) and a 100×4 version ($599). It is anxiously awaiting the finalization of iSCSI and 10GbE standards, expected sometime this year. This should really allow aging start-up Alacritech to take off, since for the moment, no OEMs have been named. Support of iSCSI by big names such as IBM and Cisco is a plus. Will Boucher make Alacritech the kind of success story we saw with Adaptec? In any case, his recent 3rd financial round, at $13 million, will let him see what’s ahead.

Note: Alacritech continues to license its patented accelerator technology, but is no longer manufacturing the ANX series of NFS accelerators.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 169 on February 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.