History

Started in 1985 by founder Herb Rorke, the company was a spin-off of Control Data’s Business Products Group. Rorke Data became the OEM and distributor of several CDC product lines and soon focused on data storage-related products. Rorke Data quickly subdivided the CDC customer base into vertical markets focusing on customers with the common denominator of large scale data storage requirements. The vertical market approach helped Rorke become the world’s largest disk pack distributor and then onto delivering the first high-end hard disk drives and RAID solutions. Rorke’s customer base continued to become more sharply vertical and still, to this day, includes television stations, post production houses, hospitals, PACS OEMs, and print graphics customers.

By the mid 90’s, Rorke Data was the leading supplier in its vertical market for data storage solutions, providing high performance RAID, optical libraries, and removable, rack-mounted storage subsystems. Rorke was the first to introduce removable hard drive configurations to the Audio and Video markets, allowing for fast transfers of data via “sneaker-net”. With the advent of faster network technology, Rorke quickly became a leader in Fibre Channel technology, even putting on the first of its kind “FibreFest” – a gathering of Fibre Channel device developers at Apple’s “Garage” in Cupertino in 1998. This was a proof-of-concept event networking 24 editing systems to a whopping 600GB of Fibre Channel storage.

Medical Diagnostic Imaging and PACS OEM’s not only came to trust Rorke Data’s Healthcare team to provide high performance archive libraries, servers and RAID systems, but also came to trust our Professional Services division. Today, Rorke’s Professional Services group differentiates us from other distributors and integrators by providing the advantage of a state-of–the-art call center offering field services such as installation and onsite post-sales support as well as data migration services. This powerful combination of products and services was further enhanced by Rorke becoming an ISO 9001 and ISO 13485 facility, supplying OEMs worldwide.

In 2001, Rorke was purchased by Bell Microproducts [NASDAQ:BELM], a $4B computer systems and components distributor in San Jose, CA. As a wholly-owned subsidiary, we continued to thrive and are now capable of supplying an even wider range of products and services to our industry verticals on a global basis. Over the last 10 years, Rorke has emerged as a unique supplier in the storage market place. We leverage Avnet's billion dollar buying power for both components and off-the-shelf third party branded solutions. Therefore, we offer branded solutions such as IBM, HP, or Dell, as well custom solutions and finally Rorke’s award winning, patent-pending Galaxy^® brand of RAID, NAS and SAN-ready storage solutions.

As of 2010, Rorke has been in business 25 years. We have many milestones to be proud of, and we have successfully reinvented ourselves many times in the context of a dynamic technology marketplace. We have shipped our 10,000th Galaxy RAID system, and continue to gain new customers and partners for this product line on a global basis. Our management team and senior sales and technical staff have all remained on board for the course of their careers, many since the inception of the company 25 years ago. This is a testament to Rorke Data’s viability and value-proposition.