John Chamber’s epiphany – driven by a stock price swoon – that Cisco should stick to its knitting has another logical conclusion: dump the benighted Universal Computing System. But is the damage already so bad that Cisco is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t?

Cutting the Flip camcorder loose is easy: fire the employees; dump the inventory; take the write-down. Is an angry Flip mob going to storm Tasman with torches and pitchforks?

But the case for dropping UCS is more compelling. First and foremost UCS margins are much lower than Cisco’s big switches.

Dress it up however you want and the result is the same: servers are lucky to get 30% margins, a trifle against 60-70% switch margins. The more successful UCS is the worse for Cisco’s margins and stock price.

For this we need a high-priced CEO? A 1st year MBA could figure this out.

Shane, come back
The bigger problem is the damage to Cisco’s reseller relationships. HP has invested billions to become a network vendor – would they stop now if Cisco canned UCS?

Of course they would. Not because of anything Apotheker says, but because if the HP sales force could sell Cisco instead of 3Com they would. HP could keep investing in 3Com and other network suppliers – as would IBM, Dell and Oracle – but they could slow down and focus on more profitable opportunities.

Things will never be as cozy between Cisco and its big resellers as it was before UCS. But it would be a lot better than it is now.

Strategic retreat
How does Cisco get out of the UCS business without alienating their very best customers? By selling it to HP, IBM or Oracle.

Get a bidding war going and they might even make a profit. Great way to cement a new reseller agreement.

The StorageMojo take
The bigger issue here is Chambers himself. Yes, he’s done a good job with Cisco, but that was years ago. In the last 3 years he’s made a number of bad decisions: buying Flip; not selling Flip; launching UCS; and NOT buying EMC or NetApp when Cisco’s stock price was high and theirs was much lower.

Routers have 60%+ margins and so does enterprise storage. Networks and storage are fungible in a way that networks and servers aren’t. Private label/reseller agreements are much more common, so Cisco could have moved into storage without enraging its big resellers.

But no. Like many a CEO before him – and he did well longer than most – Chambers no longer understands his industry.

It is time – past time – for him to hand the reins over to a new CEO. He’s made a pot of money, built a great company and, if he wants to preserve his legacy, should move on. Soon.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. David Pogue reports that Flip was about to launch a new camera that could stream direct to the Internet over Wifi. A boon to insurgents everywhere.

Does NetApp’s purchase of LSI’s storage business – not known as Engenio – portend a fundamental change in NetApp’s business model? No and yes. Here’s why.

The story
NetApp has often contrasted their single focus on Data ONTAP with EMC’s confederation of businesses. NetApp may be much smaller than EMC, but their focus on a single software stack has given them an R&D and marketing advantage over EMC.

If that is changing, customers are right to be concerned. If NetApp is backing away from DOT after a painful and lengthy rewrite, that would suggest that all is not well.

No
The LSI buy does not represent a major strategic shift. Why? Because there is little overlap between the NetApp and LSI product sets. The new product line is additive, not cannibalization.

The LSI product line is focused on fast direct-attached storage. The controllers are popular in video and HPC. NetApp, of course, is big on SAN and NAS.

Yes
While it isn’t a major strategic shift, the LSI buy is a shift: they are adding to their product portfolio to win incremental customer dollars. They are also adding an OEM business to their already healthy reseller channel.

The StorageMojo take
New CEO Tom Georgens continues to push overdue changes. The LSI buy is an easy win for NetApp: they already have a storage sales force and a wide enterprise footprint.

Adding fast DAS to the portfolio is smart: the sales and support teams can easily train-up on the LSI kit without losing focus on their bread and butter. With direct sales NetApp can apply proven end-user Margin Enhancement Technology to Engenio’s anemic OEM margins.

The more interesting test is seeing how Georgens integrates Bycast into the product portfolio. Will it be positioned to serve a new market, or will it be blended with existing products?

The bottom line is that NetApp hasn’t had many – any? – successful acquisitions. It is a skill they need to learn.

They needn’t imitate EMC’s technology publishing model – of which Documentum and RSA are unneeded distractions – using their financial clout to purchase brands that have crossed the chasm. EMC’s world-wide sales coverage allows them to pay top dollar and then rapidly pump up sales.

NetApp isn’t in that league – yet. Baby steps now will pay off in the long run.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I was impressed Tuesday night by NetApp employee support for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation benefit for pediatric cancer research.

It isn’t about the capacity. It’s the performance.

I few weeks ago I asked StorageMojo readers to help out Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, a semiconductor research firm. They did, and Jim got some surprising results.

Now that I have finished interviewing 21 PCIe SSD users (both Fusion-io and Texas Memory Systems users, thanks to help from StorageMojo) I can step back and see the common threads. One surprises me a bit.

The almost universal reply from users is that, although they were able to reduce the use of other hardware by adding flash to their system, they were unhappy that the price per gigabyte for flash is so much higher than HDDs.

In one or two cases the SSD displaced very expensive hardware. One company was able to re-deploy a $500K high-speed SAN which it now uses to perform backups.

A couple of others slashed their DRAM sizes by as much as 2/3, leading to power savings. Answers.com decreased the server count in each of the company’s five data centers from four to one by eliminating the need to shard its databases.

There are side benefits to such moves.

• Any future system expansion that uses the new approach will be able to get by with less hardware, saving money along the way.
• A smaller system is usually easier to manage than a large one, saving in HR costs.
• In some cases fewer software licenses will be required, cutting operating costs appreciably.
• Smaller systems are likely to consume less power than their predecessors.

This last may seem to be a small point until its effect over time is considered. The last three all accumulate over time to become important sums.

Yes, this is a TCO argument, I agree, but it’s a GOOD TCO argument. Although the cost per gigabyte of an SSD may be an order of magnitude greater than that of hard drives, very many systems can save money by deploying these devices. Unfortunately it’s difficult to tell exactly how this will come about until after the SSD is deployed.

As I knuckle down to compile the survey data into a report I’ll be considering the impact of SSDs on the data center, and how the findings of these 21 companies can help others who have not yet adopted the technology.

This exercise has reinforced my position that flash will become widespread in the data center, but not as storage; it will rather be thought of as “something else” that brings cost and power efficiencies that can’t be attained through more established methods.

The StorageMojo take
Jim’s findings surprised me. But thinking a bit I’m surprised that I’m surprised.

Why? Back in ’06 I wrote about the Capacity Illusion, the storage industry equivalent of the economist’s “money illusion.”

The capacity illusion: most customers need IOPS, but they buy capacity. And then they moan about how much unused capacity they have or, in the SSD case, how much SSD capacity costs.

While faster and cheaper SSDs are rewiring data center architectures, something more powerful is needed to rewire customers. A concerted industry effort to classify and promote on IOPS, perhaps?

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Speaking of research, if you haven’t done so yet, please support StorageMojo by completing the Internal Storage Survey. More about it in the previous post. Thanks!

EMC is spending time and money to prank NetApp. Why?

Stephen Foskett documents things EMC is doing to irritate NetApp:

• A small fleet of Minis with EMC colors parked in front of NetApp HQ
• Marking the sidewalks in front of NetApp’s HQ with EMC slogans
• Sharing photos of these pranks at EMC events

Here’s a photo, courtesy of Mr. Foskett, of the sidewalk branding:

OK, cute. But none of these will get enterprises to spend more money on EMC. So what is the point?

Marketing chess
Great competitive analysis reverse engineers the competitor’s messages and tactics to understand top management’s world view. For example, once you understand what top management considers their biggest weakness, you, the challenger, can goad the company on that point knowing they’ll have no good answer.

That’s a nice tactical win. Score bonus points when their top management has a clumsy response to your goading and draws attention to the weakness.

The StorageMojo take
NetApp’s current marketing narrative is: “we’re pulling away from the pack to become EMC’s chief challenger.” This narrative is supported by their growth and profitability.

EMC doesn’t often talk to StorageMojo, so I’ll guess their narrative is something like: “we’re way bigger than NetApp, and now we have competitive products, so ignore them.”

Then the customer says: “can you spell NetApp so I don’t accidentally ask them for a quote?” That’s the problem with pranking on a smaller competitor.

There’s another possibility: NetApp’s success is demoralizing the EMC sales force. The pranks are intended to tell the field: “sure, we’ve been losing to these guys for years, but that’s over – we’re taking the fight to them!”

That may work. But the products have to walk the talk, or soon the sales force will feel demoralized and betrayed.

The feel-good pranks are, at bottom, a distraction and waste. If EMC now has a converged storage infrastructure as good as NetApp’s, let them prove it: convert some high-profile customers and get testimonials. That’s what will sell the glass house.

That shouldn’t be too hard, given that Isilon has been taking business from NetApp for years. EMC’s real challenge is to cannibalize their own Clariion and Celerra business with their new Isilon or whatever gear faster than NetApp can.

Let’s check back in a year to see how it’s working.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

Ken Olsen, the founder and long-time CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), died Sunday. It is a sad day for hundreds of thousands of DEC alumni.

DEC’s beginnings
As a grad student at MIT Ken worked on Project Whirlwind, the world’s first interactive real-time computer system. It was also the first computer built by engineers rather than scientists with features like built-in test circuits and standardized modules.

In 1957, with $70,000 in VC funding, Ken started DEC. Computers were then a money-losing business, so they left the word “computer” out of the name.

My work with Ken
I joined DEC in 1981 at a great time. The VAX 32-bit supermini computer was the hot FORTRAN box – 5 MHz processor, 2 GB user address space, and a screaming 13.3 MB/sec backplane – and soon DEC announced Ethernet and then VAXclusters.

My KO time began in 1987 when I became the Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) marketing manager. Three weeks later Ken told the Financial Times that MAP was “built like a Russian truck.” In short order I became the Industrial Ethernet marketing manager.

MAP: the network no one needed
MAP was a lesson in how niche markets go wrong. The vision was for a network that could cover huge factories with a deterministic protocol, driving robots across the network. And it needs to be EMI proof and handle huge amounts of factory floor data.

These perceived needs led to a new network architecture: broadband token bus. Yes, an analog CATV network – with headends and all the analog headaches – customized for the factory floor.

The industry and some VCs were going along with the MAP fantasy to the tune of about $100 million a year. Only KO had the smarts to call it out.

Re-marketing Ethernet
The fun part for me was that due to KO’s interest I was given carte blanche to market Ethernet to manufacturing. The #1 problem was that no one had validated MAP claims or Ethernet’s suitability for the factory floor.

One example: Digital promoted Ethernet by saying a single ethernet could be 13 miles long. But manufacturing didn’t care about distance: they cared about how much area a network could cover.

It took about 20 minutes to configure a maximal Ethernet network and I found it could cover an area of over 4 sq. mi. – larger than 99% of the world’s plants. In 5 years of Ethernet marketing no one had done that.

MAP’s other “advantages” had about as much substance. Factory floor data volumes were minuscule. Robots had local controllers – duh! –
and thickwire Ethernet was so over-engineered it would work anywhere EMI wasn’t burning people alive.

KO proposed a demonstration of Ethernet’s EMI resistance: use a Van de Graaff generator to generate huge sparks around an Ethernet cable. He even whiteboarded some differential equations to be sure it would work. It was a huge success: even non-techies got the message.

KO the terror
KO was kind to less senior employees. But he could be brutal with senior management.

The much-liked network group VP, Bill Johnson, was to give a conciliatory speech to the MAP User Group. But at 1AM BJ got a call from KO, who dictated the key points of a more confrontational speech.

I was tweaking the speech with BJ when the call came and I was surprised at Ken’s energy around it. And nobody in the MUG liked the new speech.

Downfall
After 30 years at the helm, Ken’s vision failed him. Senior people urged him to open-source DECnet to head off TCP/IP; to move VMS to x86 to beat Microsoft; and to adopt UNIX as a core DEC technology.

But he just couldn’t see the sense of it. DEC had invested millions to create superior products and he felt they should get a return. So he moved to emulate IBM instead.

DEC hired a lot of IBM’ers who didn’t get the DEC culture. And squandered a billion dollars on the VAX 9000 mainframe fiasco.

When the PC juggernaut hit DEC, after wiping out DG, Wang and Prime, the company couldn’t reposition. KO got fired and a clueless new CEO accelerated DEC’s decline.

The StorageMojo take
But Ken’s missteps came after 30 years of leading a tiny startup to become the 2nd largest IT company in the world. He created a unique culture with a sense of mission that valued creativity and experimentation.

Very few entrepreneurs have done what Ken did in building DEC. Partly it was luck – interactive computing was and is a big trend – but he was also able to remain grounded and open to the possibilities over decades of hard work, long hours and unbelievable success.

But perhaps the greatest monument to KO is the affection for him that suffused DEC. That is why so many of us are sad that he is gone.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Here’s the New York Times obit.

The cowboys at StorageMojo’s Global HQ are saddling up for a ride out to Storage Visions 2011 and the International Consumer Electronics Show. Yippee-ki-yi-yay.

The high volumes and intense competition of consumer electronics drive manufacturing costs down the learning curve fast. That creates the economic pressure that drives enterprises to use consumer tech – SATA for 1 example – where ever possible.

With video driving Internet traffic and consumer content creation, the lines between consumer and pro storage are being redrawn. USB 3.0 and/or Light Peak will give home users the bandwidth to take advantage of simple storage arrays for the first time.

And, or course, NAND flash is still working its way into system and storage architectures. 2011 is the year that SSDs enter consumer consciousness in a big way – which they may not be ready for.

The StorageMojo take
I’m looking for interesting folks to meet with. Send a comment to this post and I’ll get back to you.

I plan to post on both StorageMojo and ZDNet.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Also looking forward to my first crossing of the new bridge over Black Canyon. It’s 900 feet above the Colorado River and should knock at least 30 minutes off the trip time.

HP’s off-the-charts $2.35B buy of 3Par is why Dave Donatelli gets the big bucks and you don’t. Mr. Donatelli, late of EMC, has big plans. But what are they?

We can tease out part of Donatelli’s worldview from the size of the bet.

1. 3Par fills a big hole in HP’s lineup. EVA is aging. HDS is good, but it is unseemly for a major storage vendor to be reselling them – something that doesn’t bother IBM’s Global Services group.
2. HP can’t compete with EMC unless it also offers a competitive full line of its own storage. EMC may have retreated a bit from the suffocating account control model of the 90′s, but they remain the kudzu of storage: give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile.
3. HP can ramp its moribund storage sales and marketing to compete with EMC. Otherwise that $2B is for naught.

Door #3 is Donatelli’s big challenge. No one else has been able to make HP’s massive sales force competitive with EMC, so the $2B question is: can Donatelli?

HP vs EMC
History: in a boneheaded move, HP signed an OEM deal in 1995 that gave EMC access to every one of HP’s top accounts. EMC wasted no time convincing HP customers that EMC was the storage expert, not HP.

An HP marketing guy justified the deal by pointing to all the margin dollars HP got for very little investment. Not to mention all the lost margin dollars ever since!

HP vs HP
In a big company with a direct salesforce the key to product success is not customer mindshare. It’s salesforce mindshare.

The salesforce and the sales engineers are in the trenches with the customers. They see the opportunities. They have the customer’s ear.

Donatelli’s problem is motivating HP’s salesforce to sell way more HP storage against tough competition from EMC, IBM, Oracle, NetApp and Dell. Coming from EMC, with its dedicated storage sales force, Donatelli lacks experience with a multi-line salesforce.

Which points to a problem with hiring EMC execs: they come from a unique culture. How?

1. Dedicated storage salesforce: the different product lines have to compete for sales mindshare, but they are all talking storage. They aren’t shifting gears from middleware to blade servers while dealing with blowups in storage and services.
2. Aggressive sales culture. Unlike most tech companies, EMC’s culture was formed in the low-tech, intensely competitive add-on memory business.
3. Business-value – CIO/CFO – focused marketing and sales.

That isn’t HP.

The StorageMojo take
Many theories of the 3Par acquisition have surfaced. I take the acquisition at face value: HP (Donatelli) wanted 3Par for what it would do for HP – and against EMC – not because of what it would do to Dell.

Dell has a lot of work to do before it can sell big iron storage. They would have wasted most of 3Par’s assets.

Today’s question: how much of 3Par will HP waste? HP hasn’t done a good job of integrating prior acquisitions. Where are Lefthand and IBRIX?

Solving the sales problem is more critical than HP’s suffocating engineering processes. The engineers will eventually slog through the code reviews and release bureaucracy.

Convincing the sales force to spend time and bandwidth promoting storage is the hard part. Successful sales people are adept at making their numbers with the least possible effort and risk.

Right now, that’s blade servers, pizza-box servers, PCs and services. Not storage.

Sure, HP can adjust budgets and comp plans, but those are nudges, not orders. AFAIK no one has published on the diffusion of new product sales in large companies, but the process as I’ve studied it is arcane. Each sales office has to get comfortable selling and supporting the product, a process that takes time and a realistic battle plan.

Does Donatelli have the chops and the troops for the job? If he doesn’t, HP will fall even further behind EMC.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

Winding up the week – it is Friday here – in Japan as a guest of Hitachi Data Systems. Fine hospitality from my American and Japanese hosts in steamy mid-summer Tokyo. Looking forward to Arizona.

The practitioners in the group – one who loves XIV, others with EMC and NetApp kit – were surprised by what the HDS stuff does. Such as virtualizing and managing your current storage platforms, regardless of vendor.

Seems like the big guys have been promising that for years. HDS delivered? Whoa.

A couple of things impressed me:

• The senior Japanese execs weren’t the starchy, face-saving guys I’d expected. The Chairman of Hitachi made a speech to about 10,000 people without a tie, and all the other execs I spoke to followed suit. Even giving careful non-answers they came across as relaxed and realistic. Are they also decisive? We’ll see.
• HDS has a clustered object store. I hope to get briefed on it next month.
• The parent company has a vision for using massive amounts of data to improve our quality of life. Since they also produce power systems and high-speed trains they have a direct line into some critical issues.

The StorageMojo take
HDS is a multi-billion dollar company with some leading edge products and technologies. They’re about the size of NetApp – and I know you’ve heard of them.

As their OEM relationship with Sun winds down – or at least I expect it to – they’ll have more direct contact with a new group of customers. Now is the time for HDS to sharpen their messaging and turn up the volume.

Sadly that isn’t likely. The internal dynamics of the company seem to lead to generic messaging that fails to plant a hook. Maybe it is a consensus thing. But they aren’t doing customers any favors.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Any recent experience with HDS?

Leaving Sunday for beautiful downtown Boston. Really: much nicer since they finished the Big Dig.

Hoping to learn more about Atmos. Did you know it is available as an online service?

And I want to talk to some of the RSA researchers working on storage, but I’m not sure they are part of EMC world. Maybe I can squeeze in a visit to their Cambridge lab.

Any thoughts on stuff I should see? If you’ll be there and would like to talk please comment or email.

The StorageMojo take
Heard that of the 15,000 or so folks expected, some 5,000 will be carrying an EMC badge. Nice break from cubicle heaven.

Shades of DECWorld. But back in the 80s the minicomputer business was getting killed by PCs. The threat to EMC’s business is commodity-based scale-out storage, something they are wisely embracing with Atmos.

DEC founder and president Ken Olsen grew DEC for 30+ years, a record I don’t believe has been equaled by any other computer industry entrepreneur, though Bill Gates comes close. But even Ken didn’t know how to navigate the shift from vertical integration to assembling horizontal commodities. Nor did he see how commoditizing DEC’s proprietary technologies, such as DECnet, VMS and VAXclusters, could have ensured the company’s long-term survival.

That’s why Atmos is important to EMC. As our data continues to cool, commodity-based scale-out – or specialized hardware with commodity prices – storage is critical. Tucci seems to get that.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Looking forward to seeing springtime Boston – if the weather cooperates.

Brilliant
NetApp is buying Bycast, the little-known but likely most successful scale-out file storage company. Bycast has several hundred customers, many installed petabytes, leadership in a growing market segment – medical imaging – and a compelling value proposition.

What they didn’t have was market presence. Most of their sales came through OEM deals with IBM and HP, who rebranded Bycast’s software – the Brocade problem.

They also had the common Canadian reluctance to promote themselves. No marketing VP. What marketing efforts they made followed “big company” models – something few small companies can afford.

Their most effective spokesman was their CTO, co-founder and blogger David Slik. Why he got detailed to SNIA committees is a mystery.

The StorageMojo take
This is a brilliant move by NetApp – as long as they execute. They can’t afford another Spinnaker.

Tom Georgens has been putting his stamp on the executive team. What they do with Bycast will be a good first test.

The most interesting angle: Bycast’s replication and resiliency means you don’t need to back up a properly configured cluster. Which means you don’t need Data Domain. Hmm-m-m?

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I did some work for Bycast and I’m a fan of their technology.

The Wall Street Journal gave Brocade free advertising with the article Network Specialist Brocade Up for Sale back in October. 5 months later Brocade is still for sale – and despite the HP/Cisco network wars it still isn’t clear why anyone might buy them.

Brocade’s acquisition of 10GigE developer Foundry Networks was supposed to make them a purer networking company, but Cisco’s market share doesn’t leave a lot of room for anyone else. Brocade is losing share in the Ethernet market and stock analysts are cutting their forecasts.

A weak foundation
Brocade’s troubles have been years in the making. The company put itself in a box with its go-to-market strategy and hasn’t found a way out.

Brocade’s troubles reflect the dangers of an OEM strategy when your partner’s strategic interests are different than yours. None of them wanted Brocade to succeed as a networking company.

Hope
A key reason for the excitement around storage networks in the late ’90s was the hope that the network effect would drive storage costs and commoditization
the way it had with Ethernet. But that didn’t happen.

Single-vendor networks
The major vendors paid lip service to interoperability – plug feasts at SNW – but production-quality interoperability never happened. With all FC switches coming from either Brocade or McData it should have been easy – but since the storage vendors realized that there was no business advantage in openness, it never did.

Brocade was powerless to press the issue since the OEMs controlled the product support. No enterprise customer would buy a switch that his array vendors wouldn’t support.

So Brocade was stuck with a profitable business that wasn’t going anywhere. Except south. They needed better strategy advice than they were buying.

None of Brocade’s customers want the company either. Other customers won’t want to buy from them – EMC buying switches from HP? not for long – so the company valuation looks rich from a 5 year cash flow perspective.

The StorageMojo take
The OEM channel is popular in tech because it removes the expense and exasperation of selling to end-users. You work with fellow engineers at the OEM to qualify the product and their sales people do the work.

You don’t think you need much marketing – really, you do, but few realize that – and very few sales people. And the sales people you do need are the cool, savvy relationship cultivators, not the high-pressure closers. It’s almost all good.

The bad is the loss of control. Other people position you, test you, support you and ultimately use you for their gain. That can work well if, like DEC early on, your widget is buried inside another product and you’re free to market to end-users.

But as Brocade illustrates, you can’t rely on OEMs to build your brand. You have to do it yourself.

The WSJ article suggested HP and Oracle might buy Brocade. But the only valuable part is Foundry’s 10Gig products. And that piece is heading south too.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

Verari Systems is now Verari Technologies. The company’s assets were purchased by the original founder, Dave Driggers, after an attempt last year to get another round of financing foundered.

They’ve had some success with their containerized compute/storage systems. There haven’t been many buyers amidst the Great Recession and the credit crunch didn’t help.

Here are edited comments from their website:

Original Founder Leads Investment Group in Purchase of Verari Systems’ Assets

Founder aims to re-start company with concentration on data center design and optimization services, modular container-based data centers, blade-based storage and high performance computing solutions.

San Diego, Calif. – January 19, 2010 – David Driggers, the original Founder of Verari Systems, Inc., . . . today announced the successful acquisition of substantially all of Verari Systems’ corporate and intellectual property assets by an Investment Group led by Driggers.

Mr. Driggers is re-starting the Verari engine this week. The new company, Verari Technologies, is offering immediate support to past Verari Systems’ customers.

Verari’s award-winning FOREST containers are one of the industry’s best selling portable data center solutions. The containers, as well as Verari’s BladeRack architecture, utilize Verari’s patented Vertical Cooling Technology to increase energy efficiency while reducing a customer’s energy bills.

“You’re going to see a concerted effort on our part to license and promote these unique technologies,” states Mr. Driggers.

Most of the staff was laid off last year because the company couldn’t meet payroll. The new company retains much of the former senior management.

The StorageMojo take
Verari is wise to take a step back from direct competition with HP, SGI and IBM. HP owns the biggest chunk of the blade market, buys over half the world’s disk drives and, in the 9100, has some very dense storage. But HP can’t be all things to all people – and Verari can help fill the gaps.

While the density benefits of blades are undeniable, some question whether they are cost-effective compared to high-volume commodity boxes. Verari’s pricing seemed more aggressive than most blade vendors – perhaps too aggressive – but price is another competitive tool they may choose to wield to the benefit of buyers everywhere.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

I noticed this morning that co-founder Geoff Barrall is out as Data Robotics CEO. The VCs installed their own guy, who previously was head of sales and marketing at on-the-ropes Brocade.

Given Geoff’s banishment from the executive team and the lack of a “time to take DR to the next level” quote from him, it looks like he didn’t go willingly. Update: Geoff’s name is back on the executive team web page as of Thursday the 18th. I hope he and the company can figure out a role for him. Of course, if they don’t we may get an even more innovative company. End update.

I’ve asked a couple of those involved to comment and I’ll update this post if and when I hear anything more. My impression could be wrong.

The StorageMojo take
Founders can be an irreplaceable asset in building a company for the long term. But not all of them can be a Ken Olsen, taking a company from a $70k investment to over $14B in sales in 30 years of growth.

Yet even if they aren’t executive timber for the long haul, they can be valuable for a fast growing company, giving newcomers a cultural template and old-timers a touchstone in the midst of often mind-numbing change.

Like Dave Hitz at NetApp, Geoff seemed to be a great ambassador for the company and might have been a continuing asset – if the VCs wanted to build a major company. But given the sad state of the IPO market it appears DR is being groomed for acquisition – a decision Geoff might not have agreed with.

But when you take VC money you also, usually, give up control of your fate. It’s the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. On an unrelated note the RSS feed should be working. Safari’s View Source option doesn’t show every character that Firefox does. Huh?

Looking at ZL Technologies suit against Gartner (seeGartner’s magic hydrant) I noticed an interesting disconnect between their filings and their web site.

The filings make impressive claims:

• Symantec’s search is so slow as to render it useless for its intended purpose
• Low total cost of ownership
• Runs in the existing environment, imposes no costly changes
• Better support than Symantec

They sum up with:

. . . ZL outperforms Symantec by over a thousand-fold in search speed; searches with far greater accuracy than Symantec; scales to one to two orders of magnitude above Symantec in any given vault; and reduces the cost of servers, storage and administrative overhead to half that of Symantec.

Wow. Who wouldn’t check that out?

But try to find those points on ZLT’s web site. The home page spends more time talking about the Gartner suit than their product’s advantages.

Should lawyers do a better job selling the product than your web site does?

Shy techies
How hard would it be for the home page to say something like:

Find out why ZL’s archiving solution:

• Is up to 1,000x faster than the competition
• Makes no costly changes to your IT environment
• Is much more scalable and affordable
• Has one of the quickest support teams in the business

We’re ZL Technologies. We try harder.

OK, it could use some tweaking. But the point is if you went to ZLT’s web site you’d quit before you learned that. On a web site you’ve got maybe 30 seconds to grab attention so visitors keep clicking and reading.

Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid
A client once told me that 98% of their customers had NetApp installed. Why isn’t that on the homepage? Well, it is too aggressive, too in your face.

But the greatest storage success in the last 20 years – EMC – was brutal going after IBM in ’92-’96, trumpeting every benchmark, customer win and IBM stumble as loudly as they could. EMC was, then, the scrappy underdog against an entrenched and complacent IBM.

The StorageMojo take
There is a lesson there. Challengers act differently than incumbents. They have something to prove, new ideas to promote and converts to make.

Adopting the “trust me” tone of the big vendors doesn’t cut it. You must be aggressive in telling your story.

And that story needs to be simple so the people you want to reach will work to hear it. People won’t dig into your web site unless you give them a reason.

Gartner can label you any way they want. But you have only yourself to blame if you don’t give people a reason to look beyond the label.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Disclosure – companies pay me to help craft their stories, but ZLT isn’t one of them. And yes, that is a quote from Almost Famous.

For another perspective on Gartner, check out “Objective” think tank analysis.