Auspex Systems

» see auspex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ask anyone in a data center what you call the appliance that does nothing but hold other machines' files and you get a brand name back: NetApp. It has been NetApp for the whole of my working life. Auspex built the thing first, and its own bankruptcy press release, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2003, says so in those words: the world's first network attached storage server, shipped shortly after the company was founded in 1987.

Larry Boucher started it in Santa Clara after leaving Adaptec, where he had been chief executive. The proposition was narrow and it was right. In the late 1980s an office with a hundred Unix workstations served their shared files off a general-purpose minicomputer that was also running everything else, badly, and Auspex sold a machine that did the one job instead. It listed on NASDAQ in 1993 under the symbol ASPX, and for several years after that it was the serious choice for data center file serving.

The numbers in its own filings tell the rest without help. Revenue climbed from $115.6 million in the year to June 1995 to $202.5 million two years later, carrying $24.4 million of pre-tax income in that peak year. Then it fell every year without exception: $168.9 million, $113.5 million, $82.2 million, $51.9 million, and $28.9 million in the year to June 2002. The 1997 profit was the last one the company ever reported.

~ the case file ~

~ functional multiprocessing ~

The architecture had a name, Functional Multiprocessing, and it was the reason the machine was fast. Instead of one processor taking network packets and disk traffic in turn, Auspex gave each function its own processor and let them scale separately. A host processor running Unix sat on top and supervised, and because it was not in the data path it could be rebooted without the machine stopping serving files.

~ the slide ~

Boucher left in 1997 to found Alacritech, which is the same year the revenue peaked. Bruce Moore had arrived as chief executive in 1995, and from there Auspex was overtaken, first by Network Appliance and then by EMC, which between them turned a specialist appliance into a commodity market Auspex was too expensive to compete in. The 1999 attempt at a stackable system, sold as the 4Front or NS2000, shipped with Mylex RAID controllers that gave trouble.

In February 2000, with the dot-com peak weeks away, the board brought in Gary Sbona of the turnaround firm Regent Pacific as interim chief executive. The interim ran three years and no recovery came with it. The last product, the NSc3000, was pitched as the first gateway between storage area networks and network attached storage, and it did not change the direction of the revenue line.

~ twenty-seven people ~

The filing is first-party and precise. On 22 April 2003 Auspex filed a voluntary petition for Chapter 11 liquidation in the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, case number 03-52596-mm11. The press release attached to the 8-K is headed with the cessation of sales and development operations, and the sentence that stays with you is the plain one: in conjunction with the filing, Auspex terminated all but approximately twenty-seven people, most of whom were kept on to answer the phone for existing customers while the assets were sold.

They sold fast. NetApp took the patent portfolio at the bankruptcy auction on 13 June 2003 with a bid of $8,975,000, outbidding EMC and Intel, and later used those patents in court against BlueArc. The services business went to GlassHouse Technologies for about $280,000. auspex.com still answers today with ninety-four bytes and an empty page, a small tombstone for a firm that once billed two hundred million dollars a year.

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