Quantum snaps off its NAS arm
Quantum snaps off its NAS arm
Quantum has said it will spin off its network attached storage business into a separate company called Snap Appliance which will merge with a third independent company.
Snap Appliance will pay Quantum between US$11.3 million and US$13.2 million for the latter's Snap Server and Guardian families which help storage administrators set up and run network attached storage (NAS) devices. Snap Appliance will also take a "significant" number of Quantum's employees who worked in its NAS division.
Snap Appliance will also merge its assets with those of a privately-held firm called Broadband Storage, and receive financing from investment houses including Moore Capital Management and Mellon Ventures, with the whole deal expected to be finished by the end of October.
Broadband storage was a start-up that was itself spun off from Delphi Engineering in the year 2000, which specialised in hybrid NAS and storage area network (SAN) hardware, using Fibre Channel instead of IP-based networking, which it called "scaleable unified storage".
The president and CEO of Snap Appliance will be Eric Kelly, a 20-year veteran of Maxtor, Dell and IBM. Several other key executives have been poached from Maxtor's defunct NAS division, adding to the handful of Broadband Storage personnel such as chief technology officer Greg Bolstad.
The situation for end users is not likely to change, since the Snap Server and Guardian products will continue to be sold by existing distributors and resellers. Quantum and Snap Appliance said they would both provide support for the two product lines for existing customers.
For its part, Quantum will focus the efforts of its Storage Solutions Group on data protection software. The company said the transaction was a "major component of the second phase of Quantum's two-phased restructuring plan, which was announced on September 9". The first part of the restructure involved sacking 1,100 employees and outsourcing production of its hardware. The restructure quickly followed the appointment of former SGI and Microsoft executive Rick Belluzzo as Quantum's CEO on September 3.
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