StorageTek is going to back off its pursuit of a copyright on the term "information life cycle management" (ILM). Maybe now it can focus on selling things instead of worrying about words.

				is brocade on the block? It's been rumored for awhile, and now we're hearing word from Wall Street that Brocade is shopping itself. Sources say the switch maker has hired bankers Goldman Sachs to do the deal. Brocade shares are currently trading around $8 -- less than 10% of what they were during the glory days of 2000, and still above a fair value rating of just under $5 (according to Morningstar). Once potential acquirer is Applied Micro Circuits Corp of San Diego. AMCC bought struggling HBA vendor JNI last month. With Brocade, AMCC would own both ends of the Fibre Channel wire, and can drive costs way down.

EMC paid $1.7 billion for Documentum and $1.3 billion for Legato. It's now fair to say that they actually are a software company. Finally.

Interesting that EMC has hired most of the senior talent right out of Hewlett-Packard. First Mark Lewis, then Mark Sorenson and now the very senior Howard Elias. If the reverse occurred, how long do you think it would have taken for the first lawsuit?

Two stealthy startups are soon coming to market. Pillar Data Systems in San Jose, CA, and Compellent Technologies, Eden Prairie, MN, are subsystem companies with impressive stories. Compellent was started by Xiotech founder, Phil Soran; Pillar is run by X-IBMer Mike Workman, and is funded by Larry Ellison.

Look for the Hitachi global storage technologies and IBM disk roll up of last year to start paying dividends. Word is they have the best serial ATA (SATA) disks, and they are showing up on the No. 1 or No. 2 spot at most major OEMs. Seagate is slugging it out with Maxtor and Western Digital to secure the other spot because typically OEMs will only qualify two drives per generation.

End-user opinions of SATA hard drives from Seagate are lackluster to say the least. One engineer told us that after waiting five months for a pair of 80GB SATA 7,200 rpm drives to be delivered, they have both failed. After the vendor replaced the 80GB drives with higher capacity SATA disks, the failures continued. An unsuccessful attempt to get a refund has soured the user, who says he'll no longer do business with the disk maker.

Speaking of selling things, rumor has it that there's unrest in the StorageTek camp. The company has messaged ILM and disk, but appears to be continuing to get 90% of its revenues from traditional tape. The numbers are good, but why not call a spade a spade? If the tape business is strong and the others weak or nonexistent, why not drop the rhetoric and take advantage of the business that is working?

Thinking of upgrading to LTO-2? You might want to hold off for a bit. Word is that LTO-2 media suffers from unusually high failure rates--even for tape. One LTO-2 media manufacturer even went so far as to halt production, we hear, although at press time we were unable to determine which manufacturer that might be.

Word is Brocade is going to restructure its sales compensation plan lower, which may make sense overall, but is never accepted by a salesforce. Typically, that means unrest and a high turnover.

Former Zambeel CEO Darren Thomas quietly showed up running Dell's storage business. The odds of Dell staying alive are probably much better.

It turns out Rod Schrock, president and CEO of Linux file system startup, Panasas, had his first media tour and it will be his last. A former bigwig for AltaVista and Compaq, Schrock says he'll hand off the reins at Panasas to pursue other interest within the next six months.

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.