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.
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. …
"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".
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...