News

posted on 28 May 2008 10:18

Copan Systems, the inventor of MAID storage, has tripled revenue in twelve months and is investing in new facilities as well as hiring new people to grow its business.

MAID, standing for Massive Array of Idle Drives, is a technology whereby most hard drives in an array are spun down, consuming no power and generating no heat. This enables the drives to be packed more closely together with a uniquely high level of storage density. It is far higher and it saves far more power than spin-down technologies which generally don't stop disks spinning altogether.

Copan's Revolution array is positioned as an archival storage alternative to tape for the storage of persistent, rarely accessed data.

All tiered out

Garry Veale, chief sales officer for Copan, said: “It’s time for change. Enterprise customers are screaming out for innovation and change. They are frustrated that ILM has delivered an unnecessary number of storage tiers. It’s tiering overkill; it’s tiering overload; it’s tiering abuse! It has to stop as it’s no longer affordable or economically viable, due to spiraling costs and the unnecessary complexity it creates. Customers are looking for a new, cleaner, simpler and more effective approach to data management. And COPAN Systems is now delivering it - an Enterprise MAID platform that has been purpose built to allow them to deploy best practices for their increasing persistent data challenges.”

New customers

In the last year Copan has seen a steep rise in demand and gained 60 new customers with system capacities ranging from 100TB to multiple petabytes. The demand is global as the customers span 60 countries across five continents:-

- In North America they include Comcast, Warner Brothers, Time Warner, Western Union, Qwest, Hewitt, NASDAQ, Facebook, MySpace, NASA and multiple federal accounts,
- In EMEA, the companyhas won British Telecom, Arup, Credit Agricole, Canal+, Novartis and Credit Suisse (Asset Management),
- The emerging Asian sales now exceed 25 installations and include Toshiba, Tokyo Metro Bank, NRI and Beijing Met Office.

New facilities

To cope with this rising demand Copan has invested $3 million in two new facilities. There is a solutions center in Longmont, Co, and a new engineering facility in Southborough, Mass.

The Longmont center will strengthen efforts to integrate with over 25 application technology partners such as FalconStor (for virtual tape library and deduplication software), Symantec and Rocket Software, and application partners such as Bycast and Pharos. It will provide these partners with a state-of-the-art lab environment for product integration and joint customer demonstrations.

The focus is on engineering at the technology development center at Southborough which should enable Copan to tap into the pool of New England engineering talent. It aims to recruit engineers focused on further developing the MAID platform.

New people

David Dew, vice president of engineering, joined Copan in January to lead development. He has almost 20 years in the storage industry and his background includes senior and executive roles such as director of NAS technology at Sun Microsystems, and senior engineering positions at StorageTek, Storage Networks, WinStorage and BMC Software.

Two other former Sun Microsystems storage veterans have also joined Copan in the USA as software development managers. Gus Barillas will be responsible for the development of file-based systems from the new Southborough facility, while Michael Madigan will be responsible for the platform team and management software at the Longmont headquarters.

Jeff Hines is now appointed as a new regional sales vice president in the USA. In EMEA, Stefano Manna joins as regional vice president for Southern Europe. He will be based in Rome and responsible for growing business in Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.

In Asia, two new country managers have been appointed, David Wong in China and Daniel Kim in Korea.

The recently announced China and Korea office openings brings Copan up to 15 worldwide offices, joining the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Singapore and Japan.

Copan is steadily ploughing its furrow and growing the scale of its business. The tripled revenue shows that customer demand is out there, which is only to be expected in these green, electrical power-limited times. The product is sold into enterprises, hence the need for the new solution center. We can expect significant software developments as the new Southborough center comes on stream. This MAID is growing up.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}