The following article was e-mailed to me today from one of the "Yahoo's". Feel free to verify authenticity..looks like a story from "Computerworld":
Seagate founder: Look for Fibre Channel, optical storage in the future
By Tom Diederich
Al Shugart, 68, who founded Seagate Technology Inc. two decades ago -- and was fired from his position as the company's CEO last July -- helped build the world's first disk drive at IBM in 1956.
In 1973, he co-founded Shugart Associates, the company that pioneered the floppy disk. He has also held various positions in engineering, management and development at IBM and Memorex Corp.
Today, Shugart serves on the board of several companies and sits at the helm of Al Shugart International (ASI), a venture capital firm in Soquel, Calif., that he started a month after his ouster from Seagate. He also serves on the boards of SanDisk Corp., Valence Technology, Inktomi, Cypress Semiconductor, Sarnoff Digital Communications and Sierra Imaging.
He was interviewed by Computerworld reporter Tom Diederich.
In 1995, storage per megabyte cost around 50 cents, and today it's around 2 cents. Now that there's so much cheap storage, what are the implications for information technology management? There's so much more storage now that is costing less and less, but managing that data is obviously getting more complicated.
I think IT management has always been faced with the same difficulties, and that is making proper use of their storage. It's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, so whether it's optical or magnetic, I don't think that it makes much difference. The IT challenge is going to remain the same: How do you keep track of all this stuff? And not only now, but also a few years from now, when it's twice as big.
But how will they manage it? With what kind of interface?
I think Fibre Channel will be the interface of the future between storage and computers. It's a serial interface, it's not that costly, and there's not the same limitation on the distance you can have between your storage and your computer. The ATA interface has really been too slow, and people were using SCSI, which is a parallel interface but a little too expensive and confining. So Fibre Channel is going to be the interface of the future.
Do you see storage-area networks becoming a trend?
Oh sure. And what that means to me, whether it's storage-area networks or network storage -- there's all kinds of names people are putting to it -- is that you put more intelligence into the disk drive. You put some computer intelligence into the disk drive to take some of the load off the server, and that permits the disk drive to make some decisions. It's a lot more complicated than that -- I'm oversimplifying -- but that's what it means: putting more intelligence into the disk drive.
What's the main benefit of making "intelligent" disk drives?
It permits you to serve larger amounts of storage on a high-speed basis. If I'm the server and I can have the disk drive doing part of my work, then I can do more work.
What is the Internet doing to storage needs?
The Internet is a fantastic catalyst for increased storage. Whether it be magnetic, optical, magneto optics or even tape, the growth of the Internet is requiring so much storage that it's been a boon to storage companies, regardless of what technology they are in. And that's going to continue. I don't see any stopping that.
Even so, the past couple of years have really taken a toll on the U.S. storage industry. What has happened to cause the decline in your opinion?
I've been predicting this for several years -- that there would be a consolidation of storage companies . . . and that at some point in time, there would only be a half-dozen of them left. And at the time I was predicting this, when I was at Seagate, I said two of the half-dozen would be Seagate and IBM. But this consolidation has got to happen, and it's been happening.
And this industry consolidation is a necessary development?
Well, yes. A start-up has a tough time even getting into it. The cost of entry is just really high, and in order to be productive, you have to have the economics of volume. And to have the economics of volume, you have to have heavy production and lots of customers -- and that means not too many companies.
You founded ASI just a month after your ouster from Seagate last July. Can you tell me a little about your new company?
We're a resource center for start-ups. We help with getting them financed and help them with any other administrative logistics they may need. We do a lot of the public relations for start-ups, for example.
Are these companies you invest in strictly technology-related start-ups?
We don't have any hard rule on that. One of the companies we've invested in makes nontoxic insecticide. Is that high-tech? I don't know. But we own 30% of that company, called Orange Guard [in Carmel, Calif.], and they make insecticide out of orange peels. But otherwise, all of the things we've been looking at are what you would consider high-tech.
How many companies have you invested in so far?
We have stock in three companies right now. One of them we got stock in exchange for doing their public relations for a year. So we didn't provide any money; we just struck a deal where we do their PR and they gave us options on some stock. But our venture capital fund is just now being organized, so the financial investments we have made were taken from our own ASI funds. [The companies include Blue Sky Research in San Jose, Calif., which makes high-performance electro-optics components and subsystems for the IT industry, and Siros Technologies Inc., also in San Jose, which makes ultra-high density optical storage products.]
What technologies and services do you see emerging from the storage industry that IT leaders should be paying attention to now?
We think optical recording is probably going to be a big thing in the future as the requirements for memory get higher and higher and as magnetic recording reaches its limit. We have an investment in an optical component company, and we're doing public relations for another optical storage company that we have stock in. From a technology standpoint, we think optical storage will be very important in the future.
Is optical storage being embraced or ignored right now?
Optical storage really hasn't proven itself yet. It's been around a long time, the most obvious example being the common, garden-variety compact disc. But that's not very high-capacity storage. For real high-capacity storage, optical storage companies really haven't proven anything yet -- whether it be magneto optics or straight optics -- and it's going to take another generation or so of those products before IT people start believing in them. It's going to happen, but it's a few years away. |
