Why NetApp shouldn’t buy Solidfire An analyst tells me Solidfire’s technology and locations both have inherent limitations that will prevent its product business from scaling. The first point, says the analyst, is that its technology over-optimises for capacity, via deduplication, and it doesn’t have enough resources left to process and manage its metadata. …
StorageTek (long since part of Sun) established a huge Boulder site back in the late 1970s, and had no problem staffing it. Lots of spinoffs and startups since. There is not only a tech workforce there, it's a far cheaper and more pleasant (and more family friendly) place to live than Silicon Valley.
And yes, the workforce is more stable, as it is in the whole corridor from Boise through Colorado Springs.
This is a poor piece by the usually excellent Chris Mellor.
What evidence is there that this unnamed analyst knows what they're talking about? Usually anonymity is for insiders who need to be protected from reprisals, but who have insider knowledge that provides a useful perspective.
This is just gossip unless it's been corroborated by at least one other source, and we need to have some information about why we should believe anything they say. What is their agenda? What biases might they have that the reader should be aware of?
Chris, I am disappoint. :(
"extreme tech gymnastics will no longer be needed, negating Solidfire’s capacity advantage over the next two or three years, said the analyst. Ditto XtremIO’s, in the analyst's view"
Er.... XtremIO does not in any way have a capacity advantage. It is architecturally limited to a maximum of 4:1 compression.
Usually I like Chris' articles. I find them on target. This one is wide of the mark. SolidFire is in all sorts of cloud companies being used in heavy stress environments and has just picked up three Best-In awards. There architecture is a ground-up approach to scalability and has features such as quality-of-service and advanced clustering that most others in the flash storage array business lack. My first inclination is to believe that the "analyst" either is not particularly competent or has an agenda. Chris, this is not journalism - this is advertisement for a competitor. Solidfire is an excellent company with excellent products. If NetApp were to buy them they would be buying an excellent highly scalable storage solution. Very surprised by (a) the slanted and poor quality of the article, (b) the "analyst" who doesn't appear to know much and (c) that you would trust what they say. Looking forward to your next article which I think will be back to your normal quality.
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