Nice guys, Brian, Greg, all of them…

They could easily cluster LCA (AX/CX) arrays behind this box

They could make MAUI come alive

And gracefully have a Invista “plan B”

OR…they could Cereva’ize it

To set the record straight. 5 years ago the only cool technology YY had was fuzy orange dice that when thrown said “yottayotta” Management up until that point changed their minds and the product destination on a regular basis leaving the engineering team frustrated and the product nowhere. You are correct that 5 years ago disk was dropped however do you know why? Well, at that time YY had a highly scalable box that did not scale beyond two blades, it was supposed to support 100′s even 1000′s of drives but at that time could only support about 30x, there was no RAID 5 or for that matter anything other than 0,1,0+1. The distributed controller did not work on anything other than a very fast very low latency network and even then was unstable. These were just the obvious issues. Bottom line was that there were so many issues that tough engineering decisions needed to be made. Given that 3-Par and Cerreva were way way ahead in delivering a real product, disk seemed an obvious technical and business choice. At the time Disk Virtualization was not even being discussed in the market. I will not argue that shutting down the company may have also been reasonable decision. For the next 5 years the company lived on a small fraction of what the former management pissed away on crazy marketing hype and yes not one but two YY songs. Over that time A solid product emerged and paying customers arrived some of them like AOL with extremely demanding requirements and work loads which pushed the product well beyond what anyone else in the market was delivering. Many customers returned to purchase more gear, a clear sign that something was working. The product was far superior in some ways to many products on the market in the space, SVC and Invista to name two. Scalability was the #1 advantage YY had over these other companies, however SNAP, Thin provisioning and many other bells and whistles never made it into the product. The main reason, complexity, the highly distributed highly scalable, cache coherent solution YY’s best asset was also its biggest liability. Features in a basic controller are fairly easy to build compared to a fully active clustered cache controller which spans distance. Add this to no money to expand the company and an investor (EMC) who you RIGHTLY warned about in an earlier blog, and the odds of succeeding became very low.

At the end of the day I believe YY had a very strong future however had to deal with a lot of bad legacy and a set of investors that never understood the business or for that matter the market. So after years of trying the investors saw a way out and took it. Could the management team have done a better job? Sure. But with the dollars being highly rationed, even 20/20 hindsight may not have resulted in success.

The million dollar question is, was the product on the right track? Was the technology sound? If and or how will the product emerge with its new owner? Invista replacement? New RAID controller? Who knows. I do however think its safe to say that since there seems to be a bunch of X YY’ers now working for EMC the product will likely emerge somewhere.

As for greg’s comments above, good people, friends, who gave a lot over many years to this company lost their jobs last week. So next time, why don’t you keep your small minded comments to yourself. Unless of coarse you actually have something productive to say.

Prove me wrong, but I know your type and you have either already responded to the above paragraph or even though you realize I have set you up, will have respond to this with more useless opinions.

When I saw their latest product at a trade show, I thought it was a good niche concept …just horribly expensive, totally out of norm. Perhaps they acquired EMC’s taste for astronomical margins. A little history from..

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=6742&page_number=12

Updated: 7/13/01
After less than a month on the Top Ten List, Yotta Yotta gets bumped into the Bit Bucket. It’s lost its place to Zambeel Inc. – a hotter company that’s backed by virtuosic venture kapitalist, Vinod Khosla (see Khosla’s Back, Backing Stealth Startup). It must be said, also, that the Yotta Yotta Song didn’t help them any.

I guess Zambeel was not that much ‘hotter’ as it became a funding ‘blackhole’, greatly helped by ‘virtuosic capitalism’.

Who was responsible for the name and the song ?