History 2004: Profile of Start-Up Archivas

Name:
Archivas (formerly Reference Information Systems)

Founded in:
2003

Location:
Waltham, MA

Web:
archivas.com

Financial funding:
$6 million (first round in April 2004)

CEO:
Andres Rodrigues

Product:
Archivas Cluster (ArC)

Competitors include:
Bycast, Datacentertechnologies, EMC (Centera), Isilon, Permabit

Comments:
The company is venturing into a highly fashionable domain at this moment: archiving of fixed content documents such as medical images, voice recordings and email with the use of an object based file system. ArC is an archive management solution that authorizes access to protected fixed content files. It enables heterogeneous hardware to operate as a redundant array of independent nodes (H-RAIN). An interesting aspect to the start-up is that the storage concern was founded by an actual user (too rare these days), Andres Rodriguez, the former CTO with The New York Times in charge of technical strategy on digital content preservation. He is nevertheless supported by several storage industry veterans, such as Asim Zaheer, VP marketing, who previously held the same position at SRM company Storability Software, and Neil Colstad, VP of business development, who held various management positions at EMC. A version of Archivas solution is being tested by NASA’s Goddard Flight Center

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 196 on May 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Sold to HDS in 2007 for $100 to $120 million