'Golden Boy' Returns

5:40 PM -- BlueArc Corp. founder Geoff Barrall is ready to make a run with a new startup, which apparently has little in common with his old company (see BlueArc's Barrall Says Bye Bye).

Barrall has been courting VCs and hiring staff for his Mountain View, Calif.-based Trusted Data Corp. Unlike BlueArcs enterprise NAS product, Trusted Data is developing data protection appliances for SMBs. So far, Trusted Data has 16 employees and funding from Greylock Partners

and RRE Ventures.

Barrall, dubbed the “Golden Boy” by Byte and Switch during his early BlueArc days, certainly has a lot less gold to work with in his new post (see Top Ten Storage Networking Stars). Trusted Data has $6 million in funding -- a far cry from the $175 million his old company pulled in (see BlueArc Pulls In $15M More).

If Trusted Data is to make it on that shoestring budget, Barrall will have to devote all his time to his new company -- unlike his final days at BlueArc when he spent a couple of days a week working as an advisor at Data Domain Inc.

The most obvious link to the company Barrall left in January is Trusted Data’s marketing director Jim Schaff, who held the same title at BlueArc. The rest of Trusted Data’s management team so far consists of chief architect Julian Terry and director of engineering Mark Herbert.— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch