* PolyServe gets another $20 million to build and sell server cluster products
Cluster start-up PolyServe grabbed an additional $20 million in venture funding last week, which the company will use to add development, sales and marketing staff.
The company will add the $20 million investment to a $43 million fund it has already received from Fidelity Ventures, Greylock, New Enterprise Associates and the RODA Group.
PolyServe says it is expanding into Linux clustering. Its current products are primarily for Linux, although this last spring it launched the Matrix Server for Windows, which clusters servers running Microsoft Windows. The company also introduced a clustering tool for network-attached storage that consists of software that can be used with industry-standard file servers and shared storage.
The company claims it has 300 customers, including the Burlington Coat Factory, Amerada Hess and Wells Fargo. It has partnerships with Microsoft, HP and Dell.
PolyServe offers two major products – Matrix Server, which is data-clustering software for Windows and Linux, and Matrix HA, which monitors the health of operating systems and applications that run on the servers and allows applications to be moved to other servers if servers or applications fail.
PolyServe was founded in 1999. Its technology lets customers aggregate as many as 16 Linux or Windows servers and give all servers concurrent access to files on a storage area network.
The PolyServe products will compete with Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Server 2003, HPC Edition, as well as with Red Hat’s SAN file system, which it acquired from Sistina last year.
IDC says the market for clustering and availability products will grow this year from $430 million to $544 billion in 2006. Gartner estimates that 20% of all servers will be clustered by 2006.
