RAIDCore Gets $5M Funding, Unveils SATA Controller Line

The Nashua, N.H.-based company, founded in 2000, received in its A round of venture capital funding an investment of $5 million from Egan-Managed Capital and Longworth Venture Partners, said company CEO Tom Marmen. The funding is expected to sustain RAIDCore until profitability, he said, unless the company decides to expand its product roadmap to include new offerings.

RAIDCore's first product line is a series of four RAID controllers specifically for use with SATA hard drives by both OEMs and the two-tier distribution channel, said Mark Taylor, RAIDCore vice president of marketing.

The products are aimed at small and midsize businesses looking to implement downsized versions of enterprise applications from such vendors as SAP, PeopleSoft and Siebel, Taylor said. "Those kind of applications scream for RAID," he said. "But it has been too costly in the past."

The company introduced a total of four RAID controllers for building SATA RAID subsystems.

The RC4450 four-channel adapter and the RC4850 eight-channel adapter are low-profile boards which support the PCI-X standard, allowing them to fit into 2U enclosures, said Chris Franklin, CTO and founder of RAIDCore. They offer hot-swap drive insertion and removal and are ready to support over 2 Tbytes of capacity once new versions of Windows and Linux with that feature become available, he said.

Also available are the RC4452 and RC4852, which are upgraded versions of the RC4450 and RC4850. These two models allow up to four controllers to be spanned for a total of up to 32 channels per subsystem, Franklin said. RAID level can be changed without interrupting user I/O. Mirrors can be split by removing one hard drive and storing it elsewhere, and replacing it with a new drive, all without taking the system down, he said.

The RC4852 is list priced at $362, compared with $289 for the RC4452, $189 for the RC4850, and $160 for the RC4450. The RC4850 can be upgraded to an RC4852, and the RC4450 to an RC4452, by paying the difference in the price plus a 15 percent premium for a software key, Marmen said.

The products will be available to OEMs and via distributors to solution providers, Taylor said. While the boards are currently available, the company is still in the final stages of signing agreements with distributors, he said.