RaidCore Scores $5M

Startup RaidCore Inc. has announced $5 million in funding -- the three-year-old company's first VC investment -- as it launches what it calls the most scaleable, highest-performance Serial ATA RAID controller available today (see RaidCore Debuts Serial ATA RAID and RaidCore Pockets $5M).

The Nashua, N.H.-based startup received the funding from Egan-Managed Capital and Longworth Venture Partners. RaidCore says the investment will be used to market and sell its RAID storage technology.

"We beat the competition on price, performance, and features in a way they won't easily be able to react to in months -- if not years," boasts Mark Taylor, VP of marketing and business development at RaidCore.

The company's first products, due out this month, are four- and eight-channel Serial ATA RAID controllers delivered as 133MHz PCI-X cards. Its RC4000 controllers are based on Marvell Technology Group Ltd.'s (Nasdaq: MRVL) Serial ATA chip, but Taylor says RaidCore's software also runs on chips from Silicon Image Inc. and ServerWorks Corp.

RaidCore says its RAID controllers stand out in other major ways, as well. Whereas other Serial ATA cards support a maximum of 2 Tbytes, RaidCore's products have an architecture that allows it to theoretically handle up to 4 zettabytes, the company claims. [Ed. note: We don't even know how much data that is, but trust us -- it's huge.]"Guys like Promise Technology Inc. and 3ware Inc. will have their heads snapped around," avows Taylor, referring to RaidCore's expected competitors.

Other capabilities of the RC4000 include hot sparing for automatic failover after a drive failure, and mirror "splitting" for backup-to-disk applications.

To date, though, RaidCore has just one announced customer: SeaChange International, a video server company that has embedded its RAID software into its products. Taylor says RaidCore has also landed a nearline storage company as an OEM but can't name this customer yet.

RaidCore would certainly seem to be barking up the right tree. Market research firm IDC forecasts that by 2006, Serial ATA will comprise nearly half the enterprise disk drive market, cutting into sales of parallel SCSI and parallel ATA drives.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch