History 2005: Rackable Plans to Raise $85 Million in IPO

Founded in late 1999, Milpitas, CA-based Rackable Systems plans to raise $85 million in an IPO filed with the SEC.

The company provides computing and storage servers for scale-out data center deployments using its patented 1U, 2U, 3U and 4U form factors design.

Sales have grown from $25.3 million to $86.8 million for the 9 months ending in 2003 and 2004 respectively, highly  impressive, although with corresponding losses of $42.4 million and $41.1 million.

Its 2 largest customers are Microsoft (42% of its sales) and Yahoo! (18%).

Rackable lists the following companies as its chief competitors in the storage market: EMC, HP, HDS and NetApp.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 206 on March 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.