Word on the street is Hewlett-Packard is starting to push EVA arrays over the HDS XP512 unless a mainframe is involved. They also recently told a customer not to expect the Cisco product to be available from them until the summer time. The company is fast tracking publicly, but slow boating privately.
With CNT buying Inrange, the combined company has more direct sales people than any other switch player.
StorageTek isn't selling as much disk as it would like, but it is selling a ton of the BladeStore ATA-based product. They matched pricing with Nexsan on a big deal in the Midwest recently. The customer is using E-Vault software to do disk-to disk backup of a massive data set to the STK boxes.
Speaking of pricing, it appears to have stabilized as of late. EMC reps are saying discounts were not as heavy in Q1 vs. Q4.
New Balance--the sport shoe folks--did a big presentation at "Storage Networking World" on building a storage backbone. Pierre Baudet didn't mention who the switch vendor was, but we know it was New Hampshire start-up Sandial.
Former Brocade sales exec Dan Cudgma landed at security startup Decru, Redwood City, CA, where he will run the sales effort. It will be interesting to see if he can land the rest of his displaced team or former EMC'ers.
CA appears to be the main beneficiary of BMC abandoning their storage customers. CA claims to have been contacted by dozens of very large BMC accounts.
Fujitsu Softek is doing so well that word is they are picking an investment bank and will spin out of Fujitsu altogether as a standalone entity.
It's no secret that McData is in the market for an intelligent switch start-up, but which one? At "Storage Networking World" last April in Phoenix, the rumor was that it was courting Sanera, which announced its 256-port DS10000 director. A McData spokesperson will only confirm that it is talking to "everyone."
In the April 2003 of "Behind the Firewall," we mentioned that "EMC was the first big disk player to announce a commercially available ATA-based block storage disk array." Shockingly enough, we might have been wrong. Daryn Dean, south central disk executive for StorageTek wrote us to let us know that StorageTek has had the BladeStore offering out for "close to six months." According to Dean, "The BladeStore is ATA-based and provides enterprise level functionality at an affordable cost. It's good to know that we're six months ahead of the nearest competitor!" No problem, Daryn. It's good to know that people are reading Behind the Firewall.
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.
