History 2003: Profile of Start-Up RAIDCore

Company: RAIDCore
HQ: Nashua, NH
Born in: 2000
Web: raidcore.com
Investment: $5 million
Main executives: CEO is Tom Marmen, the former head of Quantum’s high-end storage group, after serving as VP in charge of enterprise storage at Adaptec, where he developed the RAID business. President and CTO Chris Franklin also hails from Adaptec, where he managed the RAID software technology. Finally, Mark Taylor, VP of marketing and business development, was director of marketing at Quantum’s now defunct SSD division.
Activity: SATA RAID controllers
Competitors: 3Ware, Chaparral, lnforTrend, LSI, Promise, Silicon Image, Vixel
Comments: Is there room for a new RAID controller manufacturer?

RAIDCore can’t be the only to believe ‘yes,’ since it has managed to raise its first funds, $5 million from 2 venture capital companies, including Egan-Managed Capital. One of the partners in the latter investment group is John Egan, former executive VP of sales and marketing at EMC, son of EMC co-founder and former chairman Richard Egan, and a major shareholder in the storage leader in his own right.

RAIDCore has just exited stealth mode to announce its first product, a PCI-X SATA RAID card with 4 or 8 channels, the RC4000, based on its proprietary Fulcrum virtualization architecture, backed by 6 pending patents.

Among its potential applications, the technology allows users to add any number of disks to an array, to change or add a RAID level without stopping the entire array, and to implement split mirroring.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 190 on October 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Start-up sold to Broadcom, then to Ciprico, then to Dot Hill