Company Atrato Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: [small biz] TECH STARTUP - Software industry launched Information storage and retrieval systems

INITIAL LIGHT BULB A 15-year hightech veteran, Dan McCormick recognized a changing market for data storage technology about five years back. Corporate and government entities were looking for fast access to their vast seas of data--measured not in gigabytes but terabytes or petabytes.

"We saw a significant shift a few years ago with businesses like Yahoo and Amazon and Google and realized it was going to go from companies needing to better store their data to companies needing to better access their data," McCormick said.

Soon thereafter, McCormick co-founded Atrato--named for Colombia's Atrato River, the fastest in the world--and started putting together a world-class data-storage team to develop the product for the 21st century.

Now CEO, McCormick launched the company in Minneapolis but relocated to Colorado within months.

"It was really around the vast talented pool of people associated with data storage in Colorado," he said. "It's proven to be a pretty good move."

IN A NUTSHELL Currently 45 employees strong, Atrato launched its flagship product, the Velocity1000--or V1000 for short--in March. The V1000 has a maximum data capacity of 50 terabytes and far outperforms the status quo in terms of both speed and performance.

But speed and performance are not the product's only selling points.

"It's a self-maintaining system," McCormick said. "The thing that fails most often (on traditional data-storage systems) is the disk drives inside. Our system is designed to handle failures. Instead of relying on humans to fix it, we built that whole process into the box itself."

McCormick said the V1000 should be able to go three to five years without traditional maintenance, an estimate the company established by testing the product for 23 hours a day for an entire year.

...