Meanwhile, SEC investigation rumors continue to circulate around EMC. Chairman Joe Tucci did sign off on SEC forms, putting his stamp of approval on EMC's finances. How many skeletons in the closet are waiting for him?
Word is Compaq's storage chief Howard Elias is beside himself - mad at the fact that Mark Lewis left the organization to join EMC. Interesting, since an HP spokesman said, "He's [Lewis] a second-string marketing guy" to the press. EMC seems pleased with Howard's displeasure.
Former StorageApps' CEO Dan Petrozzo is back at his old stomping grounds - Morgan Stanley - after selling the company to HP. Dan must have had enough of the chaos of the storage business and went back home to the serenity of Wall Street.
EMC bought Storage network management company Prisa, but neither company will confirm. Insiders leaked that the deal went down at just north of $20 million.
With all the turmoil in the area, it's surprising, but Israeli-based storage startups keep on coming. New entrants include Monosphere, BondERA, and DiskSites - and all have good stuff and seemingly deep pockets. There appears to be more storage people per capita in Israel than anywhere else we've looked. Must be something in the water.
Look for one of the big guys to scoop up UniTrends - a 12-year-old company that no one has ever heard of. UT builds a bare metal restore product that works on everything. Now that Veritas picked up UT competitor, The Kernel Group, we'd expect UT to get a good hard look from the rest of the pack.
WorldStor restart Vyant Technologies is aiming to give fellow start-up Bocada a run for their money. Bocada has a good head start in the backup reporting game. Both companies have products that monitor backups and tell users what failed and what worked.
We've heard Cisco rumors ranging from Cisco buying a ton of LSI storage last quarter (which means they may be ready to make a run at the subsystem business), to them giving 200 sales people $5 million quotas on the new Fibre Channel gear. That's $1 billion for those of you math challenged types.
Considering the whole switch market was only about a billion last year, that seems pretty aggressive.
While HP/Compaq continues to stumble through who does what, IBM seems to be getting its act in gear. Mike Zisman - he runs the storage software biz - is revamping everything from product to strategy and seems to be making headway.
One has to believe Cisco will be dismantling its NuSpeed acquisition now that it ate up Andiamo.
Are you ready for some football? The NFL is rumored to have a huge storage project underway to digitize every aspect of NFL Films, and is looking to improve the speed at which teams can get scout films by transmitting electronically as opposed to physically. This year's pick - Philadelphia.
Behind the Firewall is written by a team of industry insiders who, for obvious reasons, prefer to remain anonymous. If you have tips, send them to btf@storagemagazine.com.
