500+ Customers, Key Strategic Partnerships, Acquisition by HP
Ready to consolidate and optimize your Microsoft Windows application infrastructure? And see your configuration and management time slashed by up to 75 percent and total cost of ownership lowered by more than 50 percent? That’s what PolyServe customers are achieving with its server and storage consolidation solutions. Founded in 1999, PolyServe set out to overcome the limits of server virtualization and extend scalability, availability, and manageability benefits to mission-critical applications, and address the major data center cost footprints — hardware, software, and storage. PolyServe’s software unifies many servers and storage devices to form a modular utility that acts as, and can be managed as, a single entity.
Says Todd Behrbaum, General Manager, Microsoft Solutions at PolyServe, “The Company was founded on the idea of using industry-standard building blocks on both Windows and Linux—providing an adaptive infrastructure that enables scalability, flexibility, and high availability to support a variety of applications, especially mission-critical ones.”
The Microsoft Connection?
It began in late 2002. With introductions made through the Microsoft Emerging Business Team, PolyServe started meeting with people from the NT File System, SQL Server, and Windows Storage Server groups. Says Behrbaum, “We charted a course not only to develop the product, working closely with Microsoft on the design review phase and other product guidance (especially with the NT development team), but also worked with them to validate the market presence of our application space, especially with customers owning large SQL Server deployments.”
Behrbaum continues to explain that Microsoft has been a great customer-centric partner to work with. “For example, Microsoft’s SQL Server support team reached out to us proactively to make sure they understood our products so our mutual customers could continue to get the level of support they need. Microsoft field also actively engaged with us to bring the benefits of our technology to large and strategic Windows customers.”
The company also worked with the SQL Server Always On program, and became one of the first software companies to qualify into this program.
Where Are They Now?
More than 500 organizations worldwide are using PolyServe’s products to build computing utilities for mission-critical database services and file services in a variety of industries, including finance, energy, media/entertainment, and technology.
In particular, on the Windows side of its business, PolyServe experienced tremendous growth—about 300 percent each year for the past several, according to Behrbaum. Hewlett-Packard was reselling its software as an OEM partner, and became very interested in its focus on the scalable file serving market. Explains Behrbaum, “The business continued to grow and ultimately led to our acquisition by HP in late February 2007.”
According to HP press on the deal, “The acquisition of PolyServe places HP squarely in the enterprise NAS market and enables HP to take a more aggressive approach to this growing market segment. It also provides the ability to extend NAS technology to blades, a key area of growth for HP.”
Says Behrbaum, “Not that Microsoft specifically made the acquisition happen, but certainly Microsoft contributed to the attractiveness, as well as the relevance in the marketplace. In 2007, we won Microsoft Partner of the Year in the Advanced Infrastructure category.”
According to Behrbaum, “We’re a great proof point of an ISV and Microsoft working together to raise the bar on mission-critical, grid-like capabilities. And now that we’re part of HP, we have 29,000-plus trained services personnel company-wide on the Microsoft Windows platform. There’s tremendous strength around the Windows platform in the marketplace, and it’s a key component of our overall HP strategy to create solutions for an adaptive infrastructure.”
For more information, visit PolyServe's success story or visit the HP PolyServe Web site.
