Overland
Storage Acquires MaxiScale for scalable NAS technology
Overland Storage has announced that it has acquired
MaxiScale, a Sunnyvale CA-based startup which had some interesting technology in
limitlessly scalable file serving and storage.
The deal sees Overland get 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. It 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.
MaxiScale's technology was aimed somewhat more upmarket than
the SMB space where Overland plays. And while they had received $25 million in
venture finding, and had customers in beta testing, they ran into money problems
in the down economy, and were never able to bring the product to market.
"They simply got trapped," said Jillian Mansolf, Overland's
Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.
"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 analyst firm Enterprise Strategy
Group.
"Their beta customers were mid market, not necessarily
enterprise," Mansolf said. "We are pretty excited about the technology. For us,
the vision will be to take the concept of what they were trying to do, and
integrate it into our Snap line at a price point that is more traditional to
us."
That means that while Overland will be challenging the likes
of HP's Lefthand technology, the objective will be to do so in the SMB space,
not more upmarket, at a price much lower than the costlier alternatives. Mansolf
said they will be able to bring scalable NAS infrastructures into Overland's
traditional SMB market with a clustered scalable NAS forming a unified pool of
storage.
"Our goal is not to get into the $30,000-50,000 NAS market
with this," Mansolf said. "Never say never, but it's not going there now."
Mansolf said that Overland is well suited to be able to
integrate the MaxiScale technology into their own solutions effectively.
"We are one of the few NAS vendors left that do our own OS, so
we are able to take technology and incorporate it," she said.