Verari Systems is now Verari Technologies. The company’s assets were purchased by the original founder, Dave Driggers, after an attempt last year to get another round of financing foundered.
They’ve had some success with their containerized compute/storage systems. There haven’t been many buyers amidst the Great Recession and the credit crunch didn’t help.
Here are edited comments from their website:
Original Founder Leads Investment Group in Purchase of Verari Systems’ Assets
Founder aims to re-start company with concentration on data center design and optimization services, modular container-based data centers, blade-based storage and high performance computing solutions.
San Diego, Calif. – January 19, 2010 – David Driggers, the original Founder of Verari Systems, Inc., . . . today announced the successful acquisition of substantially all of Verari Systems’ corporate and intellectual property assets by an Investment Group led by Driggers.
Mr. Driggers is re-starting the Verari engine this week. The new company, Verari Technologies, is offering immediate support to past Verari Systems’ customers.
Verari’s award-winning FOREST containers are one of the industry’s best selling portable data center solutions. The containers, as well as Verari’s BladeRack architecture, utilize Verari’s patented Vertical Cooling Technology to increase energy efficiency while reducing a customer’s energy bills.
“You’re going to see a concerted effort on our part to license and promote these unique technologies,†states Mr. Driggers.
Most of the staff was laid off last year because the company couldn’t meet payroll. The new company retains much of the former senior management.
The StorageMojo take
Verari is wise to take a step back from direct competition with HP, SGI and IBM. HP owns the biggest chunk of the blade market, buys over half the world’s disk drives and, in the 9100, has some very dense storage. But HP can’t be all things to all people – and Verari can help fill the gaps.
While the density benefits of blades are undeniable, some question whether they are cost-effective compared to high-volume commodity boxes. Verari’s pricing seemed more aggressive than most blade vendors – perhaps too aggressive – but price is another competitive tool they may choose to wield to the benefit of buyers everywhere.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
I’ve had my eyes on SGI’s cloudrack for about a year now, and getting more serious about it, trying to get my organization to adopt the technology for our own cluster stuff. The efficiencies are pretty amazing with the rack level power and stuff, and it’s so cheap! Early versions required 3-phase power but with the X2 that can run on single phase and optionally installed in a standard 19″ rack.
I’ve never used their products but at least for this particular application the cloud rack was built for this purpose. I wouldn’t use SGI for VMware systems, much prefer HP c-Class blades (again haven’t used these yet but am sold on the technology at this point which comes down to two simple things – 16-18 DIMM slots per half height blade and 10GbE VirtualConnect), I’m just waiting on the 12-core Opertons to show their faces.
I had heard of Verari on occasion over the years but it wasn’t until they went under that I took some time to check their stuff out and had a hard time figuring out why I may want to buy their stuff over SGI’s offerings.
Verari has good stuff. They have been able to get their gear in test labs of large customers. The challenge is when time comes to buying, same customers go for established names like HP, IBM, Dell. Trying to go after large customers by themselves got Verari in to trouble. Their gear is too expensive for smaller shops to afford. If Verari can package their unique technology in bite-size pieces and their stuff can play nicely with other vendors’ stuff without trying to displace established vendors, they have a chance.