You're welcome Craig - as for your questions. I saw Store-Age at the NAB show last week. To be honest, I only spent a few minutes with them, so I spent some time viewing their onsite lit before commenting.
They seem to be a pure appliance vendor, and they are trying to be vendor-neutral when it comes to FC RAID subsytems. In other words, you can hook up anything, and they will slice and dice and manage it.
Big mistake, for a lot of reasons ...
- No disk revenue, which is > appliance revenue
- Corp office is in Israel, I wouldn't have seen that as a problem a few months ago, but it certainly is now. I don't know, if the Israel office makes all decisions for the USA, but it doesn't matter. Political problems can't help their bottom line.
- Support nightmare. Does Store-Age have kit for all the main RAID vendors out there, and have they qualified it? Obviously answer is a strong no. So, question is, how much is being spent on support? In most companies support is a huge cash cow. Is it a profit center for Store-Age?
- They can't do an integrated, tightly coupled solution. If you want to manage the RAID, you have additional hardware an software requirements, adding significant cost. Since their box is the front-end, then all management software required by the RAID vendor won't work unless you either get in bed with the storage vendor and write additional pass-through code, or you put in a FC HUB, and probably a PC to allow it to also sit on the back-end channel and do HW mgmt from there.
Other appliance vendors are working closely with RAID vendors to insure tested and tightly-coupled solutions. In addition work involves full qualification of specific RAID HW configs. You just can't slap RAID HW and a SAN or NAS appliance on top of it, and expect it to work.
Personally, I consider Store-Age a sell. |
