Following rumors about the demise of server maker Verari Systems, the company posted a brief announcement on its Web site this morning:
Verari has initiated a process that will protect our customers investment and benefit our creditors as we restructure the business. The intention is to safeguard customers investment and provide an ongoing support capability. There are several options that are being considered to provide solutions to our customers. We expect to have the new plan in place soon.
I imagine if you’re a Verari customer, that statement wouldn’t exactly fill you with optimism. So far, the company has avoided a complete shutdown, but based on reports in various news outlets as well as the VerariAlumni.com site, employees are being dumped in order to keep the business afloat. Presumably, Verari management is looking for buyers or other investors to avoid being yet another victim of the Great Recession of 2009.
The company is all about compute density and energy efficiency, as exemplified by its patented Vertical Cooling Technology and the FOREST container platform. At this point, Verari is not a huge player in the HPC market, but has sold into a number of commercial accounts, including Morgan Stanley, AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Qualcomm, EMC, CGGVeritas, Petrobras, Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Sony Imageworks, as well as Johns Hopkins and other universities and research institutions. Just two weeks ago, the company announced that NASA Ames had tapped Verari and Cisco to build the first phase of the center’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform.
Given that the company has some active accounts and some reasonably unique technology, it’s plausible another server maker could stage a rescue of Verari.