Cloverleaf Climbs Out

Israeli startup Cloverleaf Communications Inc. scrambled out of stealth mode today, as it prepares to launch a monster storage appliance toward the end of this month (see Cloverleaf Debuts '3D Storage').

The company, now headquartered in Southborough, Mass., was spun out of Israeli research and development company ELTA in May 2001, bringing with it storage technology developed for the Israeli defense industry.

Our visions was to take technology developed for the defense market and apply it to the commercial market,” says Cloverleaf CEO Avi Weiss, claiming that the company hit the ground running in 2001, with hundreds of thousands of man-hours already under its belt. Since then, he says, the company has continued to build on the intellectual property it inherited from ELTA with more specialized storage networking expertise, allowing it to offer so-called “3D consolidation” of heterogeneous storage networking services and resources.

By this, Cloverleaf basically means that it does everything under the sun for storage management and consolidation. The company’s name, which is also the name of its soon-to-be-released appliance, is meant to reflect the three dimensions of networked storage it claims to address: capacity management across heterogeneous storage environments; increasing bandwidth; and simplifying the delivery of storage services, like data protection, encryption, and disaster recovery, whether it's on a SAN, NAS, or a host.

“They have a platform that does a billion different things,” says Enterprise Storage Group Inc. analyst Steve Duplessie. “It literally does everything... It probably even has a kitchen sink, too... This thing can really allow people to do storage as a utility.”