Speaking of start ups, it's nice to see that some are actually worth something. Pirus was bought for $165 million and Rhapsody $175 million--compared to the low-ball software purchases as of late, such as Prisa (EMC) for a piddly $23 million. Shows that hardware ain't dead after all.
After a lot of back and forth, guys StorScape are on the block. Parent companies Eurologic and Hermes are both bleeding. Good technology--someone could probably get it for a song.
Speaking of Eurologic, they're trying to spin out their iSCSI disk array efforts into a new company and are shopping for money. So far, the feedback has been, "Who cares?"
Anybody heard from Legato lately? Where did those guys go?
After months of Veritas defections, the tide has turned. Brenda Zawatski left IBM's Tivoli to join the merry gang of Bloomers.
Veio, the Infiniband Fabric Management player, decided that the market isn't big enough, so they refocused efforts on a more universal fabric resource management platform. It looks pretty cool. They'll chase the system management market by trying to drive from applications down to devices, providing quality of service along the way.
CA's Brightstor Portal has customers sending in extremely positive feedback,which we really don't know how to deal with because we've never really had positive feedback from anything CA's done before. Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.
Snap Appliance is the old SNAP division of Quantum, combined with smart platform start-up Broadband Storage, and some walk-on executives from Maxtor's MaxAttach NAS business that the company recently tossed aside. This start up has a run rate of over $40 million bucks in year one and has VCs swooning all over it. SNAP was the market leader in low-cost NAS, and Quantum figured it was better off concentrating on fixing the core business, but has a nice equity slice of the spinout to protect itself. So far, the channel seems pretty fired up on the products and direction.
Eight of the 10 engineering folks responsible for the EVA product from Compaq/HP have not only left to join Seagate-they got a big early retirement bonus for doing it. Just how HP intends to continue that engineering effort remains to be seen.
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.
