Oracle's Ellison backs storage start-up with $100M

Computerworld - Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has invested $100 million worth of venture-capital confidence in a start-up company he believes can pry open a place in a crowded storage market by offering cheap, centralized management of multivendor storage environments.
Pillar Data Systems, which has its headquarters in Milpitas, Calif., is led by a team of former executives from IBM and various storage companies, such as Network Appliance Inc. and Quantum Corp., and has so far received half of the promised $100 million in funding from Ellison, its principal shareholder and founder.
Ellison, the sole investor in Pillar Data through his venture capital firm, Lawrence Investments LLC, couldn't be reached for comment this week.
Pillar Data Systems CEO Michael Workman said that even though the storage marketplace is saturated, his company has an advantage against industry stalwarts because it's 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 center managers ... didn't want to be integrators of other people's stuff."
Workman said Pillar Data is using 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 will offer users policy-based, centrally managed, pooled storage.
They expect to have a product shipping in about a year, Workman said.
Pillar Data began as Digital Appliance Corp., a storage think tank that Ellison started around 1993, Workman said.
"They 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 emphasize some and redirect others."
Ellison called Workman to take charge of his emerging company in the spring of 2001. Workman was formerly vice president of worldwide development for IBM's storage technology division, and vice president of OEM storage subsystems at Big Blue.
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, whowas also a former vice president of development for IBM's OEM storage subsystems group.