A team of former managers from Sun Microsystems Inc and Apple Computers Inc is hoping to corner the Windows NT server storage market with their new company Ridge Technologies Inc, based in San Jose, California. The company will focus on RAID Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks storage and the emerging Fiber Channel technologies, and wants to make storage systems extremely easy to set up and to use. While it admits there is plenty of competition in the storage business, Ridge says existing companies tend to fall into three categories, the mainframe I/O input/output specialists such as IBM Corp and EMC Corp, the Unix storage vendors where some 6 major players vye for business including EMC, Sun Microsystems and Data General Corps Clariion unit, and the personal computer integrators, where it says there is no company with high level I/O expertise. This is where Ridge, with its team of I/O specialists from Sun and Apple, believes it comes in. Edward Turner, the company’s vice president marketing and sales and former director of storage marketing at Sun, says Ridge has the high level expertise lacked in the personal computer arena at present, and unlike the EMCs of this world will not be hampered by a huge cost structure, which would prevent it from producing high volume, low cost storage subsystems. Ridge will develop software to enable management of distributed storage, and integration with main system management software. It says it will bring high reliability and availability storage subsystems down to the world of NT. International Data Corp estimates the NT storage market will grow to more than $10bn by 2001. Ridge says it believes external NT storage subsystems will account for some 50% of that market, and that fiber will be the main choice for communications. The company was founded by former MSL Inc co-founder and Sun Sparc Division head Bob Graham, and its management team includes three former Sun marketing and operations executives and five former Apple research and development and marketing people. Graham, president and chief executive of Ridge, was Suns Sparc Division general manager prior to 1994, when he co-founded Manufacturing Services Ltd, a provider of contract manufacturing to the electronics industry. Ridge received an initial investment from Silicon Venture Partners LLC and from disk controller and network company Adaptec Inc. As well as putting money into the company, Adaptec will also provide Ridge with its SCSI and Fiber Channel technology through an OEM agreement, and Ridge says it is working with Adaptec on some elements of controller design. The company will outsource all of its manufacturing, and of course it would not be inconceivable to find Grahams Manufacturing Services involved in some way. Turner admitted Sun was probably not too pleased at the exodus of several of its storage team, but said those involved believed there was a real opening in the market, and it was also time to do something for themselves. Thus is born yet another Silicon Valley start-up.
