Silicon Graphics International Corp. has acquired the assets of Longmont storage firm Copan Systems Inc. for $2 million.
The Fremont, Calif.-based SGI paid $2 million in cash for the assets as part of a private foreclosure sale from Copan’s secured creditors, said officials for the Silicon Valley high-performance computing firm. SGI obtained a limited number of liabilities, but did not assume any of Copan’s debt, officials said in a news release late Tuesday.
SGI (Nasdaq: SGI) intends to continue to operate a site in Longmont and hire “select” employees of the privately held Copan, officials said.
Copan’s enterprise storage architecture — its massive array of idle disks (MAID) platform — will allow SGI to offer technologies that target persistent data, officials said in the release.
SGI officials were unavailable for comment on Wednesday.
Copan was founded in 2002 out of Austin, Texas-based Austin Ventures and later settled in the data-storage-friendly Longmont. In the coming years, the firm raised more than $100 million in venture capital.
However, when the recession hit, Copan appeared to hit the wall.
Copan and its chief executive officer, Mark Ward, parted ways and a new CEO was not appointed. The company also reportedly laid off the vast majority of its staff and was down to six employees in mid-December, according to sources who contacted the Camera and those quoted anonymously by the Register online tech publication.
Last year, SGI itself went through a rebirth when the then-Silicon Graphics Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection and was acquired by Rackable Systems.
While financial issues certainly didn’t help its cause, Copan faced some hurdles on the technology side as well, and essentially was a “one-trick pony” said Mark Peters, a Boulder County-based senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group.
“The quick answer is that Copan was founded on pretty much one idea, which was the MAID technology and as good as that idea is, it was not a technology that was impossible to emulate,” he said.
The MAID technology garnered attention because it was able to store a lot of information — by including a number of disk drives in a system — and was cooler with only 25 percent of the drives spinning at any given time, he said.
It can be argued that the design decision to limit the spinning drives to 25 percent hurt Copan, Peters said, adding that competitors offered systems with a fewer percentage of spun-down drives and systems that had the ability to spin-down the drives in stages.
“Indeed, Copan started offering more flexibility, which took away the one advantage (it) had,” he said.
Peters declined to speculate on SGI’s plans for MAID, adding he had yet to speak with SGI officials.
