Press Releases
Storage Innovators Back in BusinessMay 31, 2002
Pioneering trio forecasts their most successful venture yet
Minneapolis, May 31, 2002 — Phil Soran, Larry Aszmann and John Guider, a team with a proven track record for innovation in the storage industry, today announced their latest venture, Compellent Technologies. Compellent is developing a groundbreaking network storage architecture to store, manage, and recover data for small to mid-sized enterprises.
The team's track record for technology innovation spans twenty five years. In the late 70's, Larry Aszmann and John Guider joined forces at GE Medical to redesign the GE CatScanner, revolutionizing the capture and storage of medical images. In the mid 80's, Larry and John designed the industry's first SuperServer for Tricord. By separating I/O processing functions they enabled each to scale independently, and provided a tenfold performance increase. In the mid 90s, Phil Soran joined Larry and John to found XIOtech. Together, they introduced the industry's first Storage Area Network (SAN) supporting heterogeneous servers and the ability to span volumes across any number of physical disks, a core component of storage virtualization. In late 1999, Seagate acquired XIOtech for $360 million.
The team is currently working with venture-capital firms on the first round of financing and is encouraged about the future. "It had to be a big idea for us to get back together, and we think this one is big," Soran said. They have assumed the same roles they had while at XIOtech, Soran as president and chief executive office, Guider as chief operating officer and Aszmann as chief technology officer.
"It's a proven team with expertise in both growing a company and bringing innovative storage solutions to market," says Charles Beeler, general partner at El Dorado Ventures.