Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison has invested $100m
(£63m) in a start-up company he believed could pry open a place in
a crowded storage market by offering cheap, centralised management
of multivendor storage environments.
Pillar Data Systems is led by a team of former executives from IBM
and various storage companies, such as Network Appliance and
Quantum, and has, so far, received half of the promised $100m in
funding from Ellison, its principal shareholder and founder.
Ellison, the sole investor in Pillar Data through his venture
capital firm, Lawrence Investments, could not be reached for
comment this week.
Pillar Data Systems chief executive officer Michael Workman said
that even though the storage market is saturated, his company has
an advantage against industry stalwarts because it is not hampered
by having to support legacy products.
"We felt a lot of companies in the storage arena were really just
developing a single aspect of the market or single technology,"
Workman said. "They were working on a [TCP/IP offload engine] or
piece of middleware or a switch enhancement product. In talking to
CIOs and friends in the business, we learned data centre managers
didn't want to be integrators of other people's stuff."
Workman said Pillar Data used commodity hardware and low-cost
technology such as serial advanced technology-attached disk drives,
and proprietary software based on industry standards such as Common
Information Model and the network data management protocol, to
create a bundled product that would offer users policy-based,
centrally managed, pooled storage. A product is expected to ship in
about a year's time, Workman said.
Pillar Data began as Digital Appliance, a storage think tank
Ellison started around 1993.
"[Digital Appliance] had a lot of technology projects that settled
in the area of storage-area networks and network-attached storage
and that went on for quite some time," he said. "When [Ellison]
looked at his investments in the last half 2000, he decided to
emphasise some and redirect others."
Ellison called Workman to take charge of his emerging company in
2001. Workman was formerly vice-president of worldwide development
for IBM's storage technology division, and vice-president of OEM
storage subsystems.
Other former IBMers at Pillar Data include its chief operating
officer, Nancy Holleran, who spent 16 years at IBM in a variety of
general and executive management positions in development and
manufacturing; and Pillar Data's senior vice president of R&D,
Mark D'Apice, who was also a former vice-president of development
for IBM's OEM storage subsystems group.