Mylex

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

~ the obituary ~

Mylex was incorporated in Florida in May 1983 and its first product was a graphics card. A scanned one-sheet survives for it: the Mylex Chairman, graphics on an IBM monochrome monitor, up to sixteen shades of green, a parallel printer port thrown in, sold from an address on North West 79th Avenue in Miami. The company moved to Fremont, California in September 1987 and stayed a Florida corporation on paper until the end.

Graphics cards gave way to motherboards, and motherboards very nearly finished the company off. Its own annual report is blunt about the reason, describing a maturing system-board market and the arrival of low-cost foreign manufacturers putting extreme pressure on margins. In early 1991 Mylex started deliberately moving toward storage management instead. That pivot worked. By 1998 RAID controllers were 95 percent of what it sold, and the DAC960 family sat inside servers from most of the brands then on sale.

These were boards that lived inside a machine somebody else had badged. Twenty years of working around servers has never once required me to learn whose controller was sitting in one, and that invisibility was the business model rather than a shortcoming of it. It also means the customer list tells this story better than the product line does.

~ the case file ~

~ the customer concentration ~

Mylex sold to a handful of OEMs, and the annual reports print the percentages. IBM was 15 percent of net sales in 1994, 20 percent in 1995, 14 percent in 1996, 4 percent in 1997, and then nothing. Hewlett-Packard ran 14 percent in 1996 and 2 percent in 1997 before dropping off the table too. By 1998 the top four were Digital and Compaq at 25 percent, Siemens Nixdorf at 16, NEC at 8 and Fujitsu, together 54 percent of the company, and three-quarters of all revenue came from outside the United States.

The 1996 annual report explains both disappearances without any drama. It states that IBM had designed and was by then producing its own RAID controller for internal use, and that sales to HP would fall materially because HP had given a design win to one of Mylex's competitors. Revenue went from $173.1 million in 1996 to $123.6 million in 1997, and $17.3 million of profit became a $5.9 million loss in the same step.

~ what the cards did ~

A RAID controller takes several ordinary disks and presents them to the operating system as one disk that can survive a failure. Mylex built that logic onto a PCI card with an i960 processor and its own cache memory, so the server's main processor never had to think about parity. The eXtremeRAID 1100 listed at $1,395 for two channels in 1999 and the cheaper AcceleRAID line started at $499.

The company bought BusLogic of Santa Clara to go with it, issuing 2,710,738 of its own shares in a pooling of interests that became legally effective on 21 February 1996. No cash changed hands and no price was ever stated, which is worth noticing given that the trade press confidently quoted figures at the time.

~ after the sale ~

The approach came from Mylex. Its head of American sales asked IBM whether, given IBM's interest in buying quantities of a forthcoming product, IBM might make an equity investment in the company. In May 1999 IBM came back and said it would rather buy the whole thing. The agreement was signed on 27 July at $12 a share, a rival bid at the same price in stock lost on certainty of closing, and the merger completed on 29 September 1999 at a final cost of about $259 million.

IBM kept the name for a while. Then it sold the Mylex business to LSI Logic, completing on 29 August 2002 for approximately $50.5 million in cash. LSI's accountants broke that price into its parts and put a value on the word itself: trademarks, $250,000. LSI had already bought American Megatrends' RAID business the previous August, and the MegaRAID brand from that earlier deal is the one that still ships at Broadcom today.

~ the placeholder ~

LSI took over the correspondence address on the Mylex trademark on 24 March 2004 and then did not file the declaration of continued use that keeps a registration alive. The record was cancelled on 19 June 2004. No other date marks the end of the name, and nobody decided on this one either. A filing deadline simply went past.

mylex.com still resolves. It answers nothing over https and hangs up over http, and the last few years of archived captures show a parked domain-sale page carrying German search-engine filler about RAID controllers and server storage, composed by someone who wanted you to buy the address and had plainly never looked up what used to be at it.

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