PolyServe

About PolyServe

PolyServe, Inc. operated as a specialized provider of storage and server consolidation software before its acquisition. The company was established in 1999 and headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. It was led by CEO Michael Stankey. PolyServe secured significant venture capital, raising a total of $73.5 million from investors including Greylock, New Enterprise Associates, The Roda Group, and Volition Capital.

The firm's core business centered on developing software that enabled enterprises to consolidate information from file or database servers into a single, shared pool of storage. This technology was designed to run on clusters of industry-standard servers, supporting both Windows and Linux environments. The primary market consisted of enterprise clients looking to manage, scale, and ensure high availability for critical applications such as databases (SQL Server, Oracle, DB2), ERP, and CRM systems. PolyServe's software facilitated the treatment of multiple servers as a single, manageable unit, simplifying administration and reducing hardware costs.

PolyServe's main product was a clustered file system, known as PolyServe File System (PSFS), which allowed multiple servers to access a shared pool of storage on a Storage Area Network (SAN). This offered benefits like enhanced performance, high availability, and simplified management for large-scale database and file-serving utilities. The company had a key OEM relationship with Hewlett-Packard (HP), which bundled PolyServe's software with its ProLiant servers and storage arrays under names like "Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway" and "HP StorageWorks EVA File Services". This partnership proved crucial, with a majority of PolyServe's channel partners also being HP resellers.

A significant milestone was the company's acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, announced in February 2007. The deal, valued at approximately $200 million, saw PolyServe and its 117 employees integrated into HP's StorageWorks division. The acquisition was a strategic move for HP to bolster its position in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market and extend clustering technology to blade servers.