An earthquake shook up San Jose (not mention Twitter) today. But that didn’t stop the storage industry’s movers and shakers from making all kinds of interesting news. Here’s a quick roundup from where we sit.
A game of musical chairs…
EMC lost storage tech consultant and blogger Steve Kenniston to inline dedupe player Storwize, where he will be Vice President of Technology Strategy. Steve continues to blog avidly and well at The Storage Alchemist. We may find ourselves crossing swords with him occasionally over here at Online Storage Op, but we always read his posts with interest.
And EMC has been no slouch in scooping up major talent:
Gestalt IT contributor Ed Saipetch (known to many of us edsai) started this week at EMC as Senior VCE Specialist. Prior to that, he was a systems engineer at Network Storage.
And Scott Lowe set tongues wagging when he announced last week on his blog that he’ll also be joining EMC, as a VMware-Cisco Solutions Principal. This seems a very shrewd move on their part, as Scott is well-known for his Cisco expertise and virtualization knowhow–both of which no doubt will be extremely handy as UCS takes off.
Nice going, EMC.
And in other news…acquisition fever!
Disk drive array subsystem provider Dot Hill has bagged Israeli storage virtualization company Cloverleaf for $12M in cash and stock, the Register reports. Clearly, they’re locking onto the virtualization and cloud storage trends with a vengeance. This may also give them a new edge in their battles with competitors like LSI and Xyratex.
Plenty of takeover rumors swirling around 3Par, although for now no one’s confirming anything. Whatever happens, it seems that everyone’s impressed by 3Par, the little thin provisioning engine that could. Over here at this blog, we’re consistently impressed and amused by their creative blogger Marc Farley. Financial pub Barron’s, in addition to initiating the speculation, called 3Par a “small but scrappy” possible takeover target. But who will be the suitor? Feel free to add in any and all rumors and speculation in our comments field below.
And don’t let us forget EMC, which in addition to snagging talent has picked up Archer Technologies, an IT governance software company that will be rolled into its overall security offerings for its RSA division. As Beth Pariseau reports on Storage Soup, the acqui could affect some others in the industry.
Writes Beth, “Archer brings with it a business continuity software module, which could affect those who manage disaster recovery in the storage environment. It also extends EMC’s move to inject automation into its software offerings, which we’ve seen in the storage market with last month’s first release of FAST, and is a part of EMC’s vision for archiving and e-Discovery.”
Well, that’s all for now. No doubt we’ll be seeing all manner of intrigue, rumor, speculation and other fascinating stuff now that 2010 is upon us.
