RAID Buys Assets of Zzyzx--Formerly eStorage, Formerly BCC Technologies

Published: April 17, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A small innovative storage array maker called RAID Incorporated has acquired the assets of another storage maker with a presence in the iSeries market and with the improbable name of Zzyzx Peripherals.

In November 2005, Zzyzx got a toe in the OS/400 market when it acquired eStorage, both of which hail from California. (Zzyzz was located in San Diego, while eStorage was located in Irvine.) The reason why eStorage was interesting to the iSeries market was because BCC Technologies, the midrange storage company, was rebranded as eStorage in March 2003 after founder David Breisacher left the company and the venture capitalists who had invested in BCC brought in a new management team. (Breisacher has since founded storage maker GST, which sells disk and tape storage for OS/400, Unix, Windows, and Linux servers.) Zzyzx was founded in 1991 focused on the Unix, Linux, Windows, and NetWare server markets, and acquired eStorage to get into the OS/400 market.

RAID was founded in 1994, and is perhaps best known for its Xanadu storage area network (SAN) arrays (which date from 2000) and the StorageWatch remote monitoring service for storage. RAID is located in Lawrence, Massachusetts. "Over the last few months RAID has worked extremely hard with key Zzyzx vendors and certain affiliates to offer what we believe is a best case scenario for the Zzyzx customer base," said Marc DiZoglio, executive vice president of RAID in a statement. "We look forward to helping from a support and service level as much as possible." RAID is offering telephone tech support on various Zzyzx products, but did not specify which ones. The company has not yet laid out its plans for developing new iSeries-related products, but it does offer iSCSI storage as well as Fibre Channel-attached SANs, so there are some interesting possibilities.