Data Backup Digest

Back in January of this year, The Register reported some worrying news regarding SAN startup Coraid. At the time they reported that their sources had informed them that the business was floundering and staff were losing their jobs, following the firm’s spending of over $100 million to try and launch their success.

The UK office had no-one answering calls, while the Australian operation gave out a recorded message asking for your phone number. One of their sources from the latter confirmed that the support team weren’t answering calls and that the account managers had gone.

Doom was also spoken for the US office, with all employees apparently having been terminated without severance pay. Nevertheless, their support number was still talking calls at the time.

Speaking to the site, CEO David Kresse said: “The company has been attempting to raise new capital over the last few months, but has been unsuccessful in doing so to date. Accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to significantly reduce the size of the company while continuing to evaluate all options for maximizing value.”

Fast forward a bit to April and VentureBeat are now reporting that Coraid is officially finished. The company has officially split, according to a LinkedIn post from founder and chief scientist Brantley Coile.

“Sadly there is now no more Coraid,” he wrote. “Its assets were actioned off last week. Last night the board resigned. Thanks to all the people who worked very hard on the Coraid vision of simple, fast and affordable network storage. We now go on to new and better things. Coraid is dead. Long live South Suite.”

South Suite Software is the company that Coile is now working on – one that he established last year and of which nothing is publically known about yet.

Coraid has been successfully funded over the years throughout multiple rounds of funding from investors such as Allegis Capital, Azure Capital Partners and TriplePoint Capital. However, despite the most recent $29 million round in January 2014, it wasn’t enough to keep the company afloat.

The firm began in 2000 and operated primarily out of Redwood City, California. The company had more than 1,000 customers, including the U.S. Department of Defence and the National Institutes of Health.

Coraid’s technology was a fairly simple protocol for building block access storage, but they were never totally successful in pushing the advantages to mainstream SAN user. All-flash array and hybrid flash/disk array startups began to establish themselves with faster products, causing Coraid to lose their way and become a more niche player in the market.

A new CEO was appointed in September 2013, Kevin Brown, who had previously sold Mu Dynamics (creator of cloud and app testing products) for $40m in 2012. However, it seems that even his past successes weren’t enough to bring Coraid out of the red.

With sales not high enough to convince investors to put more money in the company, it seems the firm found they had no choice but to call it a day. Here’s hoping that their employees will find their feet and that their customers can migrate their data over to another provider with ease.