The cat’s out of the bag. HDS acquires Archivas for up to $120M. Archivas was my first investment at Polaris. This is a great exit for the team and for the investors.

Founder Andres Rodriguez envisioned a new kind of infrastructure optimized for managing very large amounts of information (petabytes) over long periods of time (decades) at very low cost (below the TCO of tape). What started as whiteboard diagrams in the fall of 2002 became the best-architected solution for reference information (fixed content) management. Built from the ground up, Archivas resembles nothing else on the market. It’s 1/3 storage system, 1/3 distributed database and 1/3 content management system. Data, meta-data and policy are managed together on a RAIN cluster of symmetrical nodes.

HDS will benefit greatly in its battle with EMC by arming its sales force with Archivas technology.