Overland Acquires MaxiScale
To diversify in NAS clustering
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on October 15, 2010 at 2:58 pmOverland Storage, Inc. acquired MaxiScale, Inc., in limitlessly scalable file serving and storage. Terms of the deal are not disclosed.
Overland has gained MaxiScale’s assets, intellectual property and key members of its engineering team. The company’s technology, which is currently being integrated into Overland’s file storage portfolio, provides cloud-scale storage capabilities that reduce capital and operational costs while improving performance and eliminating the need for forklift upgrades.
"Overland scored with this deal – MaxiScale had some awesome technology. I’m glad it will finally be able to see the light of day," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, an independent industry analyst firm.
MaxiScale, a privately held company based in Sunnyvale, California, received $25 million in venture funding and developed a platform that addresses the data storage issues faced by companies with unpredictable and rapidly expanding data storage requirements. MaxiScale technology bridges the gap between traditional disk storage and cloud storage solutions, enabling data storage infrastructures to scale to massive capacities while maintaining reliability and a high performance end user experience. The integration of Overland and MaxiScale technology is designed to create compelling solutions for businesses with significant data storage growth.
"Business adoption of Overland’s SnapServer line of data storage arrays is already strong due to its reputation for performance and reliability," said Dr. Geoff Barrall, CTO and VP of engineering at Overland Storage. "The logical next step for us is to create a clustered scalable NAS forming a local cloud of storage. When the opportunity arose to acquire MaxiScale’s well-regarded technology, we took notice. MaxiScale’s architecture will provide our customers with the ability to scale hundreds of SnapServers into one unified pool of storage."
Comments
Financial-troubled Overland tried to diversify from it core business,
tape drives and automation, launching its own disk subsystems and then
more precisely NAS with the acquisition of Snap Server NAS business from
Adaptec in 2008 for a mere $3.6 million. But in disk subsystems, the
competitors are numerous, with about all the big storage companies and a
lot of small ones.
Overland has a better chance to differentiate with the acquisition of a
software to cluster NAS (or SAN) from a small start-up born in 2007.
MaxiScale's Peer Set architecture is a patent-pending technology that
delivers linearly scaling performance with each additional cluster node,
with the following benefits:
- Peer Sets distribute and replicate file data and metadata, making the MaxiScale FLEX Software Platform resilient to multiple failures and facilitating automatic self-healing
- It runs on standard, low-cost hardware: off-the-shelf servers with SATA drives and Ethernet networking
- File serving requests are distributed across Peer Sets without bottleneck-inducing centralized control points
- It aggregates up to 65,000 Peer Set instances into a single namespace, representing hundreds of petabytes.
Gianluca Rattazzi, MaxiScale's CEO and co-founder of MaxiScale, as well as CTO and other founder Francisco Lacrapa were working at BlueArc. The first one was co-founder and executive chairman and the second one in the engineering team of BlueArc. Current Overland's CTO Geoff Barrall was also co-founder of BlueArc.
MaxiScaled raised a total of $25 million including $17.25 million from New Enterprise Associates, El Dorado Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank in 2009.
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