iSCSI Scavengers – The Vultures Circle and The Hyenas Pick at Scraps

October 5th, 2008 by Steven J. Schwartz

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     The iSCSI market has been in the spotlight for the past 12-18 months within the Storage Industry.  My first interaction with the iSCSI storage protocol as way back in 2001 and 2002.  I working on Professional Services offerings surrounding StorageTek’s EchoView product line.  This was one of the first iSCSI appliances on the market, and a first for a larger storage vendor, but was limited in functionality and targeted at data protection.  No matter how revolutionary iSCSI was earlier in the decade, it is this flurry of activity recently that has been interesting.

 

     Late 2007, Compellent went public, just 30 short days prior to Dell’s announcement to acquire Equallogic.  So, who was the Lion, with the huge impact to the iSCSI market?  Hard to say, too many factors, and way too close together to differentiate between the two acts in my opinion.  When comparing these two companies S-1 filings, there are differences, and since I’m not financial expert, you are welcome to look at them yourself, Compellent’s is here, and Equallogic’s is here.  Regardless, these two acts began a very interesting market effect.  LeftHand Networks launched a channel acquisition plan on Equallogic’s partners.  A very smart scavenging move by an iSCSI software company that was clearly about to be left behind.

 

     Now, in recent news, DataCore is actively going after LeftHand Network’s channel, in an active response to the recent HP announcement for the intention of acquiring LeftHand Networks.  This move seems very familiar, almost déjà vu.   Personally, this is great news, and puts a HUGE smile on my face, not because I personally lost any on my well protected Channel to LeftHand Networks last year, but because keeping my customer base happy and my partners loyal took extra effort during the transition time between acquisition announcement and acquisition close.

 

     So the scavengers circle, trying to pick off what is left of the iSCSI marketplace.  I say what is left, because, LeftHand’s market share in the iSCSI world was so low, both it and HP fall into the “other” category.

 

Related articles:

• Citrix aims at clouds with XenServer 5
• Strong demand for drives propels storage revenue
• Disk storage hits two-year growth high
• Dell Acquires EqualLogic For $1.4 Billion

Technorati Tags: LeftHand Aquisition,HP Buy LeftHand,DataCore,Step Up To DataCore

Posted in Enterprise, SAN and NAS, Start-up, virtualization | 1 Comment »

One Response

1. John Says:
   October 8th, 2008 at 3:40 pm

   It’s a joke that DataCore thinks they are going to pick off what is almost a purely HP channel, and even a bigger joke that they think they have a comparative technology. The LeftHand channel program is going to get better, not worse with HP.

   Some DataCore technical facts:

   DataCore runs on Windows as an application, whereas LeftHand’s NSMs are integrated and thoroughly tested storage systems. Microsoft has certified LeftHand as a storage solution, but not DataCore; they are only certified as an application running on Windows.

   DataCore is also struggling to get certified by VMware and other virtualization software companies. They do little if any integration with the hardware, which means customers have to mange the hardware with the hardware supplier’s management, separately from the DataCore SAN software management, which introduces the complexity of 2 points of management.

   Since they don’t do complete integration and testing with the underlying server hardware, there are often unknown incompatibilities or problems with things like disk controller firmware. If you think about it, the customers are actually doing the testing for them, which is really scary.

   DataCore also achieves their performance by using the server DRAM as write cache. Imagine the Windows O/S hanging due to a bad driver, memory being corrupted from the DataCore application, etc., etc. These and many other similar circumstances can cause complete data loss.

   Due to envy of LeftHand and other scale-out architectures, DataCore started marketing “N+1 Grid Scalability”, which is a misnomer. It is nothing more than mirroring between 2 DataCore servers. From a performance scalability standpoint, multiple DataCore servers can’t read and write to the same volume, which limits the performance of any given volume to a single server’s I/O capability. Data protection and fault tolerance is also entirely dependent on the underlying storage connected to the DataCore server.

   If you consider DataCore’s technical shortfalls and company history, this may not be the ideal partner you want to replace LeftHand with.

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