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?
Ken Ols_o_n? Ken Ols_e_n, AFAIK(?)
You’re right. I only worked there for 14 years.
Persistent storage is the hardest part of computing.
Robin
Having been a Drobo early adopter and used their stuff almost from the very start, I must say it is disappointing but not exactly surprising that there are some signs of bumps in the road. Their BeyondRAID technology is quite fascinating to see in action, but it really is their ONLY asset. I’ve used the Drobo, the DroboShare, and the DroboPro. The DroboShare showed, if nothing else, that Data Robotics can NOT build a NAS (who in their right mind would ever consider basing a multi-terabyte NAS on an old Celphone CPU and barely enough RAM to run a basic OS?), and I have repeatedly lost multiple Terabytes of data on my DroboPro.
Amazing also that DroboPro managed to get VMWare Certified, when you can’t even remotely manage it when it is hooked up to your ESX server! If you put a DroboPro in a CoLocation facility with your ESX cluster, the only way you can ever know if there’s a disk problem is to put a webcam facing the front of the device so you can watch the lights remotely. No email alerts in a server configuration, no visibility to drive temperature, no visibility to fan speed or chassis temperature, no predictive failure analysis using S.M.A.R.T. info, no SNMP, no syslog, not even a web interface.
In the face of real-world stuff like this, I’ve been a little surprised at the universally positive press the Drobo is getting. This news is more what I’d expect from what I see of the Drobo in the real world.
That said, their BeyondRAID is still strangely compelling and I’d love to have it in the form of a BeyondRAID HBA that I could use in my own file servers.
Dave:
Check out the linux drobo utils for some remote drive status info:
http://drobo-utils.sourceforge.net/
Don’t see any temp or SMART info though.
Yes, drobo-utils works nice if you connect to your drobo using Linux, but it won’t work if your connection is from VMWare ESX. Further, if you have (for instance) 4 volumes on the DroboPro and connect to it with 4 ESX servers (each server one to it’s own volume on the Pro – let’s not even complicate it with clustering for now) and for some reason you want to remove, re-create, or add another volume, you can’t, unless you power down ALL VMs, and then power down ALL ESX servers, and then hook up your laptop to the DroboPro via USB, do the required modifications, and then start up all the ESX servers again after you’ve disconnected your laptop.
So, to summarize: no alerts, no visibility to monitor status, and no ability to do ANY administration as long as you’re up and online. Full shutdown required to do ANYTHING. Does anyone else have serious concerns about VMWare certifying a basically unmanageable device? Does it seem a bit weird all the positive press the DroboPro gets in light of this? Or am I just being dramatic?
No Dave, I don’t think you’re far off base there. It’s my first day with a DroboPro and I’m not very confident in putting this in a remote facility with two ESX servers with just the basic servers (two DCs, a file server, and a print server).
I may end up putting our development SAN back into production and just eat the cost on this Pro… but we’ll see – if it performs fairly well, it’ll at least be better than the MPC dataframe equipment we currently have there (yikes!).