Polyserve does support CIFS and NFS on their Linux product.
- This product DOES NOT have full windows ACL support, which is what most customers want for CIFS.
- By Polyserve own admission, they are focusing on the Windows product, because most of the growth is in that market.
- As noted earlier, it is not scalable for both protocols.

Bottom line is that they offer both protocols at a very basic level.

Polyserve does have snapshots at some level.
- You can use the snapshot capabilities of the HP EVA. Polyserve integrates this functionality in their interface to act like it is a Polyserve snapshot
Or
- You can use Microsoft VSS for snapshots if you have the windows product.

Bottom line is that they do not offer POLYSERVE snapshots, they only dress up someone else’s snapshot capabilities.

Polyserve supports replication
- You must buy a third party product.
- That 3rd party product supports only host based replication.
- It is not integrated into the product.

For a NAS solution, Polyserve is years from having the feature set of Isilon. I’ve used both products extensively, and HP will have to make some serious investments to make Polyserve a real player in the High End NAS Market.

Disclosure: Like anotherStorageGuy, I’m not impartial either.

With Isilon’s slams against NetApp, NetApp’s (curious) response’s, HP’s move to acquire Polyserve, and subsequently Cisco’s move to acquire NeoPath, there is certainly a lot of interest and movement in this segment of the storage industry lately.

As for storage clusters in general, HP is looking more and more desperate in this area. Remember Compaq’s ENSA? That was a really good vision, with some decent amount of reality behind it for grid (like) storage. Compaq even had the people to execute on that strategy. My how things have changed, HP decided to execute the strategy by killing it. Now 5 years later they decide to spend a few 100 Million $’s to re-acquire technology they could have had 3 years ago.

IMHO, Polyserve has a looonnnnggg way to go before it can become mainstream NAS. It has some of the scalability capabilities of NetApp ONTAP GX, Isilon, and others (though not all), while having all the shortcomings. They don’t have snapshots (wasn’t that a requirement of NAS since about 1997?), don’t have replication, don’t have integrated NFS and CIFS, etc. etc. In fact, the lack of Snapshots and having to choose NFS or CIFS really puts them back into the state of the art of NAS circa 1995.

Even fourth place NAS vendor Sun has integrated snapshots with decent NFS and CIFS.

For niche, high-end HPC environments, Polyserve NAS will be great, though best I can tell, that isn’t a large part of HP’s market.

So, looks like HP will get some good technology, and a lot of possibilities, but will have a lot of work to do in order to match the big two in NAS. To date, investing in storage engineering development (vs. acquisitions) is not something many of the larger systems companies have done much of, so I think the jury is out for quite a while…

–aSG

Disheartening advice but the reality I suppose.

I do find the term ’startup’ as used in the valley highly amusing. Such ’startups’ receive millions to build software that will be over-priced and under-spec’d just to pay off their investors. The unparalleled resources can simply end up being a distraction and not a useful tool.

Surely the way to true satisfaction is the hard way..

- Build a product on a shoe string with prolonged periods of no string.
- Innovation through starvation can be both very effective and rewarding (not in the financial sense though!)
- Build an ethos that is based around re-use not re-invention.
- Build a product that is tied to an OS and not proprietary tin.
- Build tough skin … and lots of it. Prepare to encounter and counter the phrase:
“Who are you, never heard of you, goodbye”
- If your lucky enough to get a customer or two to believe in your vision (and you will need buckets of luck) hold on to that customer, love that customer, nurture that customer and remember, that customer is way more important to you post-revenue then pre-revenue.
- Plan to build on success…. Just because you have a couple of great customers its not time to paaaarty, two customers will just about pay for the fancy Nespresso machine.

Whether in smoggy California or sunny Wales, if you manage to survive the above with friends and family still talking to you and the business sustaining itself through further customer success then satisfaction and possibly a trade sale will surely come.

If not then your screwed

Hey, if you are outside Silicon Valley, Route 128 or metro Denver you face some extra hurdles. There are a few storage companies outside those two areas: Isilon, Texas Memory Systems, Data Direct, but not many.

It is kind of like wanting to be an opera star while staying in Tulsa or - for my UK fans - Glasgow. It is too bad, but if you think you’ve got the opera mojo you need to go to New York, Milan, Paris to strut your stuff.

Come to Silicon Valley, Jelloknee! The weather is better, the VCs more plentiful, and the resources available to startups are unparalleled. If you make it you can make it huge, and if you don’t there is no shame in startup failure.

Robin

or you invent/operate outside the universe that is the US of A…. perhaps the big boys cannot afford the transatlantic call costs!