I’ll be attending Datacenter Ventures in San Jose next week, and I thought I’d take some time and go through the 66 presenting companies and see who looks interesting. Naturally, this is StorageMojo.com, so I’m biased. At some level they are all interesting

I’ve mentioned Abrevity before. They have a cool product that automates adding metadata to files and indexes them efficiently, using a technique that sounds similar to Bigtables. They have customers but no VC funding. Rather odd given all the VC money sloshing about.

Appistry, out of St. Louis, is offering something called an Enterprise Application Fabric, which they position as enterprise-level version of Google’s “underlying application fabric”. I’ve learned a couple of things about Google, so I’ll be interested to hear how Appistry’s products measure up.

ARIO Networks has built modular storage based on SAS and SATA drives. It isn’t clear to me from their website what is special about that, so I hope I learn more next week.

Berkeley Data Systems is the only remote backup vendor I’ve found that suggests they can protect your data from “. . . potential telekinetic security breaches.” I know, you’re thinking those crazy Californians – but these folks hail from Utah! They compete with Carbonite with a twist: like a friendly pusher, the first two GB of backup are free. Cool. Now they should just do away with the 30 GB limit on their $5/mo plan and they’d have something.

I Want To Go To This Office Party
Gotta love a company that is in stealth mode AND going to DV AND includes a link to the open source window management system ratpoison on their product page. Yes, that company is Calista Technologies. Be sure to read the original post that led to the name “ratpoison”. If you think telekinetic security is odd, try this on for size:

For the particularly bent crowd, I’d reccomend maybe starting out with a Luca Cardelli paper, followed by a round of OCaml hacking, and if you have another bowl to smoke and an evening to waste, follow it all up dinking around in mercury. This recipe will not result in much working code at the end of the day, but your mind will be glowing. I should warn you that only people with hard-ons for abstract mathematics and mathematical logic will really survive this course without a major headache.

This is the kind of out-of-the-box-into-a-non-Einsteinian-universe thinking that made America great, or at least a lot more fun.

The Wealthy Barbarians of Cassatt
Some worth-her-weight-in-gold PR maven got the CEO of Cassatt, Bill Coleman (the “B” in BEA) on the cover of Forbes with a breathy story on how a lot of Stylish Barbarian’s cheap stuff is going to overthrow the expensive stuff being pedaled by the Old Guard. Like it has never happened before. The money quote:

Cassatt Collage transforms your IT infrastructure using your existing, off-the-shelf hardware, operating systems, network switches, and applications. You can gradually introduce this solution into your infrastructure without radical change.

Regular readers can probably guess I don’t find that terribly compelling. How about we get rid of all our expensive stuff and replace it with something faster, better and cheaper?

More Later – Stay Tuned