back to article Curse of Woz strikes again – first Fusion-io fizzles out, now Primary Data goes down

Primary Data, the storage startup offering a metadata-driven abstraction layer, appears to have gone TITSUP – a Total Inability To Sell Us Products. The upstart's landing page on its website, primarydata.com, was blank at time of writing, and inner pages were 404ing. Its Twitter and Facebook presences have also been silenced. …

  1. a_yank_lurker

    Update

    As of 11:30 PM EST US the website was up and appears to be functioning normally. No mention of financial difficulties that I could find with a couple of quick checks.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Update

      "As of 11:30 PM EST US the website was up and appears to be functioning normally."

      It's one of those sites which is blank unless you allow access to a load of 3rd party javascript sites. If you do that then, 10:30 AM GMT it's still there. With somebody claiming that what they do is "magic".

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dumbass idea - its just a scam to make money from idiot investors

    Nobody ever bought a solution that turned over their entire data assets to a single 'cloud of data storage'.....

    Oh hang on, my bad. Yep, everyone did that. 'Cloud storage' where you don't need to understand how other people's computers work is a thing these days.

    Carry on...

    1. Korev Silver badge

      Re: Dumbass idea - its just a scam to make money from idiot investors

      In ancient history we used to run Acopia (later F5) ARXs which made life as a (then) storage admin much easier as you could migrate data with zero downtime and the clients would be completely unaware. I kind of miss that technology although we did outgrow their system in terms of bandwidth and file number.

      1. l8gravely

        Re: Dumbass idea - its just a scam to make money from idiot investors

        I too ran Acopia boxes, untill they just fell over and couldn't handle our load, which was an engineering environment with millions of files. And while the idea is great, the execution details matter. And if you want to do backups... you're screwed.

        1. If you do backups *through* the Acopia or other box, then you put more load on the system. Restores are easy though...

        2. If you backup the back end data stores directly to tape/disk/magic box, then backups are fast(er) and easy(er) to do. But restores *suck* *suck* *suck* because now you have to trawl through multiple backends to try and rebuild the contents to match reality. God that sucks.

        So then we tried CommVault's integrated system, which managed backups and archives together. Much better... until it too fell over because CommVault *sucks* at keeping file indexes online and useable for any serious amount of time. Again, retores work fine... until they fall over and it all starts to suck big time.

        It's *so* much simpler to just buy more storage if that's what you need. 'cause god knows you'll never get management to actually put their foot down and make the staff cleanup their crap files from five years ago because "we might need that!". Twats.

        1. Korev Silver badge
          Boffin

          Re: Dumbass idea - its just a scam to make money from idiot investors

          make the staff cleanup their crap files from five years ago because "we might need that!". Twats.

          For us in genomics/imaging land, that doesn't help hugely as we'd only get rid of 10-20% of our data. You also come up against the trump card of "regulator/auditor" might want to see this; which is quite hard to argue against.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Leave Woz out of it

    Let's be frank - Woz lent his name and advisory services since Apple was a huge Fusion customer.

    The curse here is not Woz, but perhaps the class of entrepreneurs who were successful in their previous endeavours during the infrastructure virtualization boom of the 00's. Anointed as product visionaries, many were given blank checks by investors, offering us YASA (Yet Another Storage Architecture), only to go TITSUP because they missed the market.

    Primary Data (Flynn), Coho Data (Xen team), DataGravity (Long), Storiant (Carbonite team), and others I've forgotten.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Leave Woz out of it

      Yep. Too many to count.

      My opinion on which one will be the next flameout: Datrium

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Leave Woz out of it

        Looks like some Datrium fanboi didn't appreciate my comment. LOL!

  4. knarf

    What they need is a ...

    ...very good mid-tier compression algorithm.

    1. Androgynous Cow Herd

      Re: What they need is a ...

      right after customers, and a working product.

  5. hipponymous

    one shot wonder

    Apparently, according to the insiders, phony CTO did them in. Smith (ceo) had to babysit the clown to make sure good engineers didn't leave.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I interviewed there about a year and a half ago.

    During the architectural chalk talk, I heard the phrase "And then WE become the file system" 3 times. I politely thanked them for their time and disengaged (and ran screaming from the building). Say that phrase to any storage admin with a NAS and he will respond "Like hell you will".

    I expected them to last a bit longer but the burn rate must have been out of control - witness the giant booth at VMWorld last year...

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