Rasilient Rustles Up Cash

Stealth storage networking startup Rasilient Systems Inc. has landed $4 million in first-round funding from Acorn Campus and the Intel Communications Fund (see RASilient Scores $4M Series A).

Rasilient, which was founded in November 2001, says it will use the funding to bring its first products to market and expand its management team. The disphonious name is a reference to RAS, which stands for reliability, availability, serviceability -- the hallmark requirements of IT infrastructure and a marketing term originally coined by IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). The Cupertino, Calif., company is headed by one Sean Chang, president, CEO and founder, but there's no information on its Website about his background.

The Website does trumpet the following slogan: "Rasilient Systems mission is to provide highly available networked storage for the masses." [Ed. note: That was one of the key demands of the Paris Commune of 1871, was it not?] More specifically: "high-availability storage hardware and intelligent software" for small and midsized enterprises (SMEs) and branch offices of large enterprises. The company claims its "patent-pending technology" lowers the cost of high-availability networked storage systems for the SME market "by making cost and no single point of failure... the primary design criterion [sic]."

We did find a few posts by people who are evidently Rasilient engineers on a Linux RAID mailing list. In light of that, along with the fact that Intel is an investor, one might conclude that Rasilient is trying to make a cheap array of disks that doesn't act like a cheap array of disks.

It's not exactly a unique idea. Other startups that fall into this category include LeftHand Networks, Pillar Data Systems, EqualLogic Inc., and Intransa Inc. (see Larry's Stealth Storage Startup, EqualLogic Draws Bank's Interest, Intransa Quiet on Plansa, and Engineers Take LeftHand Turn).