This being a short work week due to the upcoming Labor Day weekend, there was less going in the storage industry than normal. Of course, even the technology industry has to catch its breath from time to time and this week was probably one of those weeks coming on the heels of VMworld last week. That said, there were a few conversations I had with end-users and tidbits of news that came out that caught my attention and merited mention in my weekly recap blog.
One specific item that caught my attention was an article posted earlier this week on SearchStorage.com‘s site regarding Texas Memory Systems’ acquisition of Incipient’s storage virtualization intellectual property. Being fairly familiar with Incipient’s technology and having talked to a few of its early customers off-the-record, I thought its technology was sound. However like every storage vendor regardless of its size, a pure network-based storage virtualization play has remained a tough sell, especially in enterprise environments where Incipient played.
While many enterprise customers (including myself) like the network storage virtualization story and its value proposition, the difficulty is putting your trust in a single solution through which all of mission critical storage I/O runs and then convincing application owners to do the same. While I am convinced not introducing storage virtualization into the network in some form has resulted in much of the complexity that exists now, I am also convinced that most organizations would rather have that complexity than trust networked storage virtualization solutions.
However the question becomes will Texas Memory Systems actually be able to do anything useful with Incipient’s technology? This is where I think it gets a little hazy. I disagree with Beth Pariseu’s comparison in her article where she compares Incipient’s technology to IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC). Architecturally Incipient is more like EMC’s Invista technology which interacts with a Cisco Storage Services Module (SSM) that is available for any Cisco 9500 FC Director.
The issue as I see it is how does acquiring Incipient’s intellectual property really help Texas Memory Systems? Even if they are planning to partner with Cisco in some way in the near future, I still don’t see enterprise environments selecting Texas Memory System’s recycled version of Incipient’s storage virtualization software over existing solutions. In any case, this acquisition strikes me as a bad move on the part of Texas Memory Systems when it would seem there are better options available to them.
While on the topic of data centers, I had an interesting conversation with an individual on my return trip to Omaha last week coming back from VMworld. This individual is the regional sales manager for a company that sells electrical components into data centers and he had been in California planning the construction of a number of data centers in that state.
However the issue these companies were running into was their inability to obtain credit to fund the building of these data centers. This surprised me a bit since I regularly hear that California is running out of power and that there is not enough to go around. He said that is not the case at all, at least where his clients are looking to build data centers. Right now the larger issue is that they cannot obtain credit which is inhibiting their ability to start construction on new data centers.
My final thoughts for this week are around the company Atempo and whether or not it is about to be acquired and by whom. While I was at VMworld I caught wind of a rumor that Acronis was about to acquire Atempo and that the deal was pretty far advanced. I checked with a number of sources including Atempo’s CEO and none of them, including the CEO, was not aware of any such dealings. He did say that an IDC analyst had incorrectly tweeted a few weeks ago that HP was acquiring Atempo but issued a correction to that tweet. He also said that Acronis and Atempo have had some discussion in the past about working together but nothing along the lines of Acronis acquiring Atempo. Still, it makes one wonder. These are two rumors in a relatively short amount of time about Atempo and sometimes where there is smoke, there is fire.
Have a good weekend and say a small prayer for all of those affected by 9/11 eight years ago today and those in the military still fighting the battle overseas.