Rhapsody Networks

About Rhapsody Networks

Rhapsody Networks was a provider of intelligent storage networking products designed to lower the complexity and cost of managing corporate information. The company was founded in 2000 and secured $12.3 million in a Series A funding round in June of the same year, followed by a Series B round in August 2001. In total, the company raised $63.6 million from investors including Accel Management Company, Amerindo Investment Advisors, and Oracle.

The core of Rhapsody's offering was its XPath technology, a multiprotocol architecture that converted between Fibre Channel and IP protocols. This platform was developed to provide high performance, scalability, and simplified administration for advanced storage services, independent of specific storage hardware, protocols, or host applications. The products included Storage Application Directors, which were high-port-count switching devices with embedded software intelligence for tasks like virtualization, capacity management, and provisioning. The technology offered APIs for developers to create applications for fabric-based volume management, remote data mirroring, and data replication across different vendor arrays without involving the application server.

In January 2003, Brocade Communication Systems acquired Rhapsody Networks for approximately $175 million in stock. The acquisition was a strategic move by Brocade to integrate Rhapsody's intelligent switch technology into its product line to better compete with rivals like Cisco. Following the acquisition, Brocade planned to operate Rhapsody as a separate division and integrate its technology, with the first applications expected by the end of 2003.