Starboard Storage Systems

About Starboard Storage Systems

Starboard Storage Systems was a data storage hardware startup that developed and manufactured unified hybrid storage solutions. The company was founded in New Jersey in 2010 by data storage industry veterans, including Bill Chambers, a co-founder of Lefthand Networks, and Victor Walker, formerly of Storage Technology Corp. and Sun Microsystems. The headquarters were later moved to Broomfield, Colorado, to access the area's experienced software and data-storage workforce. The company officially launched in February 2012.

Starboard's core products were the AC Series storage systems, such as the AC72, which were hybrid arrays combining solid-state drives (SSDs) for performance and hard-disk drives (HDDs) for cost-effective capacity. This architecture was designed to provide high performance for active data while storing data at rest on more economical hard disks. The systems featured technologies like an SSD accelerator tier and Dynamic Storage Pooling, which allowed for parallel data transfer and performance scaling as new drives were added. The solutions were aimed at small and midsize businesses, enabling them to consolidate mixed workload environments—including unstructured, virtualized, and structured data—onto a single, simplified management platform. Starboard's systems supported multiple protocols such as CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

The company's business model included an all-inclusive software license with features like thin-provisioning, mirroring, asynchronous replication, and snapshots, avoiding incremental license fees for capacity expansion. Starboard raised $13 million in a venture capital round from German investment firms JP Ventures GmbH and Grazia Equity GmbH. According to public information, the company is no longer active.