So lately in the news there are some interesting things being done by 2 companies that just went public. Isilon and Data Domain have both started some rumblings about “new” features for their products.

Isilon is going down the iSCSI block-level access path currently, and “un-officially” is in beta with an iSCSI target mode. This is interesting since Isilon’s IPO put them with a market cap of over $1Billion, you have to wonder if the media ad content market isn’t meeting their needs. Well you actaully don’t have to wonder, you only have to look at the last Qs revenue numbers to see that Isilon needs to start finding some other areas of revenue. Since I spent a couple of years competing against Isilon in the scalable file system space, I have to say that there are plenty of good players out there that beat Isilon in availability and scalability.

Data Domain’s CEO Frank Slootman just got quoted by SearchStorage.com (see Data Domain’s CEO takes on nearline storage) that Data Domain wants to move into the primary storage tier. While he danced around “primary” by claiming that customers wanted data available on spinning disk, and not archived to tape, he still meant “primary”. This sounds an awful lot like old STK talk. I think DD needs to stick to their sweet spot, de-duplication, building “nearline” storage will still require 5 9’s of reliability, and if you look at the market, everyone has an ILM/HSM story already to meet the needs of “nearline” storage.

Comments welcome on these topics.