EMC Corp has acquired the company behind its PowerPath product for less than $50m in cash. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Conley Corp, a privately-held company of around 50 staff, is to be renamed the EMC Cambridge Software Development Center. It will focus on the development of future storage area networking technology for EMC. Founded back in 1992, Conley began as a reseller of DEC StorageWorks hardware, and later moved into the RAID business. But in the last two years, the company changed direction and launched load balancing and data path failover software for Unix and NT clusters. SafePath, which Conley also licenses to Hitachi Data Systems Ltd, became the basis for EMC’s PowerPath at the start of 1997. It distributes data across all available data paths – up to 32 on a Sequent Symmetrix system – and automatically redirects the workload in the event of a failure. EMC says it’s now sold over 400 licenses of its own PowerPath version of the software. Conley will be integrated into EMC’s engineering organization, but the Cambridge base will be kept. Situated right next to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is a useful recruiting base for EMC, whose own base in Hopkinton is 25 miles outside of Boston. Meanwhile, Conley’s remaining end-user RAID business was sold off to two Conley executives, Jean Hamilton and Kuo Hsieh, who have formed a new company, Lexias Inc, based in New York.
