Just a quick first post to tell you a little about who we are, what we do, and where we are headed. We’re all about fixed content storage. We feel that the existing offerings, both on the storage end, and on the client (protocol) end are lacking. So, what to do? StorageSwitch works on both sides. Our gateway product line provides advanced functionality to existing backend storage. Things like compliance, compression, de-duplication, object authentication/integrity. On the client side, we present an ‘apparent’ traditional file system presence to up and coming storage arrays, that don’t natively talk the standards. I put ‘apparent’ into quotes as we wrote our own protocol stack for the common FS protocols, so that we could provide enhancements to the storage without having to change the client. With that control, we can fail over in a crisis in less than a second. We store billions of objects in a single share / mount point. We add metadata and enforce policies. We are developing a suite of data asset management tools, specifically around fixed content storage. More about that later. Seems like I’m getting too much into the ‘technology’ of Storageswitch. Let me just say that we are primarily an engineering company, with some very strong opinions about Storage, and more importantly – YOUR DATA!!!
A quick history:
Born about 5 years ago, when a device with a proprietary API as an interface was about to come to market, a customer asked his consultant – "What am I supposed to do with this?" The consultant, Andy Thomson, replied, "probably the best thing, not knowing what’ll happen in the future, is to utilize a standards based interface, but with facilities for taking advantage of the new features that the technology offers". Being as everything the customer did required mission critical attributes, the gateway that was born there had all the features you’d expect in a mission critical deployment (High Availability, limitless scalability, performance, extensibility, serviceability, hot-backups etc.). And to take advantage of the new storage facilities he refused to give up anything from the existing file system protocols. All added functionality had to be available, without sacrificing (some might say substituting – whatever word you use, since it doesn’t meet the standards, I call it data loss!) existing structures. (ask me about this later).
Me, I’m Clark Hodge (or commonly referred to as Clarkster, the Clarkinator, Maypo, Sonic or just plain Clark), and I joined about 16 months ago. Having worked with Andy a number of times, I was always impressed by his product, and his personal presence. His technology blew the competition (which I happened to be representing at the time) away in terms of scalability, reliability, performance, availability, flexibility etc. He’s incredibly intelligent and I’m honored to be part of the team. I came from EMC where I was the original field evangelist for Centera. I was known at EMC (internally, and to my customers and partners) as "The Centera Guy".
It was on my cards, v-mail etc. (Amazing how tough it was to get a big company to allow something like that on a b-card! But I did it!). I figure – if you’re going to do something – do it with passion. I really liked Tom Peters stuff on personal branding that I had read a number of years ago, and this was a nice way to apply it. I don’t know how to make big money from affiliate marketing, but here’s the link to Tom’s blog and the Amazon link to his book on the subject. In addition, here’s a really well done, free e-book on personal branding – from Rajeesh Setty’s blog.
Since joining StorageSwitch, we’ve enhanced the gateway offering with stronger protocol support, and more backend storage devices. We’ve also developed our core to be more open, and capable. We can provide SQL access so that you can do things in the file system incredibly quickly, and with greater flexibility than if you were working purely in the file system. Soon you’ll see other, non-file system gateway products from us (DICOM/HL7, SMTP, Syslog…). One of the most exciting things we’ve done is our program – StorageSwitch Inside – for OEMs. SS Inside allows OEMs full access to our technology, to embed in their applications, or storage devices.
To net it out, we work hard in the fixed content space, for the benefit of the end user of, whether it be for compliance, corporate governance, records management, archival or just plain old data / information storage.
Whew, now that’s out of the way, next we can start talking about something interesting – like what people (individuals, companies, groups, agencies…) are doing in this space and why.
Tags: Data Storage, storage, fixed content, content addressed storage, records management, compliance, governance