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Server maker Verari sparks back into life

Equity-backed founder retakes the helm

The company brought in three rounds of venture funding totaling $54.2m from Sierra Ventures, Voyager Capital, Celerity Partners, Carlyle Group, and an unnamed "strategic investor," the latter of which participated in the third round in June 2007. That was when David Wright, an executive from EMC who had been brought in as CEO a year earlier was given the job of chairman, pushing Driggers aside and relegating him to the chief technology officer position and a member of the board.

The original Verari Systems was privately held and did not divulge its financials, but in November 2008 Driggers told El Reg that the company had sales in excess of $100m. It is very unlikely that this sales rate held in 2009, but with focus and determination, it is quite possible that the new Verari Technologies could get back there again.

Technology licensing seems to be one area that Driggers is excited about, and presumably his backers are as well.

"You're going to see a concerted effort on our part to license and promote these unique technologies," Driggers said in his statement, referring to the vertical cooling and DC power distribution used in the BladeRack2 and Forest containerized data centers. "With the ever increasing compute and storage issues our customers are facing today, I believe we are going to be well positioned to help them solve even the most demanding challenges."

There is no word yet on how many of the former Verari employees will be offered jobs. Verari never confirmed these numbers, but the whispers going around as the original Verari was sliding toward financial oblivion had it that the company peaked at around 300 employees before the economic meltdown and had around 225 employees prior to the December 11 layoffs. All but a few dozen key employees for supporting customers and the top brass (Wright and Dan Gatti, senior vice president of marketing at the earlier Verari) working on the asset sale were let go back in December.

A number of HPC rivals started offering support for Verari Systems' products and hiring former employees. Silicon Graphics offered tech support for Verari products (for a fee, of course) in the wake of the layoffs, and said last week that it had hired Vincent Scarpulla, formerly vice president of worldwide field operations at Verari and an ex-EMCer as Wright was, to head up SGI's sales in the Americas region. ®

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