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     What happens when your storage system is a “klunk”?   In the start-up/up-start space there are still numerous storage vendors, two recently have moved from that I would consider up-start to Corporations due to acquisitions.  These two companies are what I would NOT consider “klunks” in the Treasure Hunt vernacular.  These two companies were the $25k prize check for Dell and HP, who going against some odds took the risk to spend large sums of money for non-traditional storage companies.

     Now that I’m in a different storage game I can take a serious look at two competing technologies in the iSCSI space.  As my audience knows I did work for Equallogic, Inc.  What they may not know is that I spent a good amount of time interviewing and looking at LeftHand Networks prior to looking at Equallogic.  Now to be fair, it wasn’t Equallogic that kept me from going to work for LeftHand, and it wasn’t anything I found out about LH that made me go over to Equallogic.

     iSCSI, while that used to be a “name we shall not speak” it has become a household storage protocol in the past few years.  I can remember when Windows software initiators would literally bring a server to its knees when running any type of IO.  So, LH spent some serious time about a decade ago working on a proprietary network storage protocol, but quickly switched over to iSCSI as it was standardized.  Equallogic started down the route as a potential NAS device, but also moved quickly to the iSCSI block level standard.

     I discussed before the merits of hardware vs. server as a storage platform, and both of these entries to market have very valid attributes.  So I’m going to leave this alone.

     The PS4000 vs. the P4x00, I mean really?   Just as HP releases a formal product naming conventions (thank G-d they minimized the “starter-SAN” nomenclature), Dell releases an “entry” level Equallogic product called the PS4000.  I can’t wait to see online pricing for this product line, it looks like it will fit nicely in the “S” of the SMB space as well as the remote office/branch market.

     The future of these products will be very interesting considering the relatively small revenue % they drive for HP and Dell, but I really do hope the best for both products, and it is like two rival players each getting drafted to rival NFL teams.

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While tweeting today, David Graham (http://www.flickerdown.com/) gave me a great idea for a new game.  Use your GPS and the location data from your cloud storage and see how many chunks you can find around the state, country, world!  Anyone who can recreate a single file manually gets a trinket!

Image by ThisIsIt2 via Flickr

In Storage, in sales, in life, “Three’s A Crowd”.  In life, that third wheel is annoying when you’re on a date, the thought of a “menage trois” is a lot like the writings of Marx, good in theory and on paper, but we know how it turns out in real-life.  In sales, the multi-legged sales call usually becomes a goat rodeo.  In storage, I always consider the competition the crowd, it could be just one single other vendor, but the addition of several, with both direct sales, and indirect sales forces can cause massive confusion for customers. 

     Lately in the “Stoblogosphere” (credit to M. Farley, and recently added to the urban dictionary), the FUD has been flying!  Lately there has been FUD about revenue growth, invention of features, blah blah blah blah blah.  At the end of the day, it still is a weak sales team that spends its time trying to show the blemishes of a competitor vs. the great functions and features of their own products. 

     Even us bloggers can be the third-wheel when we butt our noses into press releases, make comments on vendor blogs, and hear back channel things that we just can’t bare to keep quiet about.  In general though, keeping it simple is the best way to forge forward.

     Well, I’ve got a cowboy hat, some great Tony Llama boots, a pair on wrangler jeans, and some cowhide gloves for this goat rodeo.

Image by tschaut via Flickr

     In my career I have worked for a Fortune 50 company, companies with less then 50 employees, private companies that have closed their doors, private companies that have been acquired, and the holy grail of private companies that went public.  What eludes me is how private companies, who are built on sweat equity, go from passionate intimate environments to painful work places. 

     I’m thinking maybe it is my fault, maybe I’m just not cut from the “corporate” cloth.  I’m willing to dive into this first.  About me, I’m what I would consider to be a young professional.  I have a formal education, I have over a decade of industry experience, however, a good portion of that experience has been working with every type of customer across the globe on the sales side, the implementation side, and the consulting services side.  Maybe it is my east coast attitude, being raised in NY, watching people sellout their mother to get a deal closed, taxis literally running each other off the road to get to the next red/green light faster, the march of ants that occurs during rush hour in NYC.  I’ve always taken that as a cherished attitude, and used to have a great sign in my office: “I wanted it done yesterday!”  In NYC this was just typical average passion and energy. 

     Maybe it isn’t about me.  Small companies, especially private companies have the ability to so agile, literally turning on a dime.  While this bring a tremendous amount of instability, it also allows stuff to get done.  Large corporations, while generally stable, get so bogged down with process and procedure that hiring, firing, developing, fixing, and just quickly accomplishing anything becomes almost impossible.  Many things are sacrificed for stability of the all might stickholder, oops, Freudian slip, I meant stockholder.  Sometimes being public is a curse.

     So, I’ve seen it go both ways, I’ve seen very passionate people working for some of the largest companies in the world, I’ve seen deadheads (not Jerry G. fans, but “deadhead” def. #6) working at start-ups, and of course the reverse of both exists in the largest version of the bell curve.  For me, I like being “David”.  So I’ll throw my world wide pants on, help another fledgling company spread its wings, and like all start-ups, if we fly too close to the sun too soon we risk failure, timing is everything.