Has Crosswalk closed its doors?
I received a tip from a reader yesterday that Crosswalk, a company I wrote about last year, has closed its doors.
I’ve called Crosswalk to confirm. I hope the tip is wrong, but many of the early players in the company have moved on already, which is rarely a good sign.
After describing their clustered NAS head for HPC I concluded with:
The StorageMojo take
Crosswalk, founded by Jack McDonnell, who had good success with McData, with CTO Raju Bopardikar, formerly of ill-fated Cereva, certainly has the bones for success. They’ve done a number of important things right: no host software; no custom silicon; commodity hardware; partnering where possible; horizontal scaling. This puts them ahead of getting-long-in-the-tooth startup BlueArc.
The High Performance Computing (HPC) focus is questionable. My experience is that folks who start with HPC stay there, because each HPC customer has so many interesting requirements that engineers love to solve and that will never make a dime for the company. Performance-driven customers ask for all kinds of enhancements that most commercial customers will never notice. So I wish them luck expanding past that market.
Another concern: the Denver location. STK culture - mainframe, big iron, slow to adapt - looms so large in storage circles there that there really haven’t been many successful storage startups. Jack overcame that at McData, although you might recall that McData sold mainframe ESCON directors to IBM for years before getting into, and largely outmaneuvered in, the Fibre Channel market. Does Crosswalk really want to go after the big NetApp and EMC NAS boxes?
Crosswalk has the potential to upset the current NAS players. Yet I think they’ll need a stronger cost argument in addition to cool technology. Fortunately their architecture gives them lots of options. I wish them luck.
Comments welcome. Anyone have any first-hand knowledge of what happened?
on July 20th, 2007 at 8:59 am
[...] Robin at Storagemojo (great blog, read it religiously) says he had heard a rumor. Yeah, I should invoke the 24 hour rule. If you are at Crosswalk, and it is still going, please let him (and me) know. Robin makes a great point there The High Performance Computing (HPC) focus is questionable. My experience is that folks who start with HPC stay there, because each HPC customer has so many interesting requirements that engineers love to solve and that will never make a dime for the company. Performance-driven customers ask for all kinds of enhancements that most commercial customers will never notice. [...]
on July 20th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
We looked at Crosswalk last year. The problem is that they’re selling a clustered NAS head product. Now OnStor has been doing that for a few years now and even they have had to sell the disks to try to survive. BlueArc is selling NAS heads via HDS and even Netapp sells NAS heads through IBM OEM agreement for IBM NAS.
What’s so new about Crosswalk? What problem are they solving really? Since they can’t penetrate in the enterprise because worthy competitors like EMC/Netapp/HDS/IBM/HP are there, they move on to HPC for a few customer wins, then they slow fade away. Plus I think Lustre is taking care of HPC nicely.
on July 20th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
A link to the cached vendor list for the Commodity Cluster Symposium being held next week. Notice that Crosswalk, Inc. is listed as an exhibitor.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:NJ9MDkgHjTEJ:www.clustersymposium.org/vendor.html+http://www.clustersymposium.org/vendor.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Below is the current list as of today of vendors exhibiting. I find it interesting that this is a conference specifically referenced on the home page of http://www.crosswalkinc.com
http://www.clustersymposium.org/vendor.html
I wonder why all of a sudden they have pulled the exhibit and sponsorship???
on July 25th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Word is all the employees are meeting for a Crosswalk wake, it that means anything.
on July 26th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Crosswalk is indeed dead. I heard it from them. The sole owner has pull the funding.
on July 26th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Crosswalk is dead…
…
on July 30th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
well the final mark has come. Looks like the website is now gone as well. R.I.P. Crosswalk, Inc.
on September 2nd, 2007 at 11:28 am
[...] Robin Harris did a write up about Crosswalk and a follow-up article as well on his blog StorageMojo.com. While I’m personally tied still to an NDA with Crosswalk, I doubt they have any money to enforce it, since Jack M. has formally shut down the iGrid Clustered NAS product in the last 45 days. Rumors have it that there are still a small contingent left working on another “secret” project of “mad scientist” Raju B. I personally don’t know anyone from the original Crosswalk sales and engineering team(s) that would work with Raju again, let alone not run him over if he was crossing the street in front if their car. I’m willing to say on the record that he was most likely the single biggest reason for the failure of Crosswalk, CSM, and iGrid. [...]
on September 2nd, 2007 at 12:06 pm
[...] Robin Harris did a write up about Crosswalk and a follow-up article as well on his blog StorageMojo.com. While I’m personally tied still to an NDA with Crosswalk, I doubt they have any money to enforce it, since Jack M. has formally shut down the iGrid Clustered NAS product in the last 45 days. Rumors have it that there are still a small contingent left working on another “secret” project of “mad scientist” Raju B. I personally don’t know anyone from the original Crosswalk sales and engineering team(s) that would work with Raju again, let alone not run him over if he was crossing the street in front if their car. I’m willing to say on the record that he was most likely the single biggest reason for the failure of Crosswalk, CSM, and iGrid. [...]
on November 7th, 2007 at 8:18 am
It was numerous things that contributed to the failure, Egos, a culture of self preservation and power struggles.
No Real product engineering direction, HPC…
As for Engineering VP’s Not a one had “a Clue”..