back to article Sales veep, staff log-off from cluster-cache upstart PernixData

PernixData has lost Ted Stinson, its veep of worldwide sales, and laid off up to 16 people in its North American channel and inside sales operations. The high-flying upstart touts clustered caching technology at the VMware hypervisor level, which speeds up virtual machine execution. PernixData was founded in 2012 by CEO Poojan …

  1. SebastianT

    I say bollocks. Who lets go of staff when they're in rapid growth mode? Something else must be going on.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      1) Pernix is a stopgap item to solve point issues between refreshes.

      2) It's a feature not a product.

      3) All the complexity of a hyperconverged offering, but doesn't store your data.

      Gee, I wonder what's going on...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Here's my take on Pernix. I work at a storage array vendor that supports VMware. As such we are basically required to implement a VAAI plugin (it runs on ESX hosts) in order to support array offload cloning of virtual machine disk files.

    1) It is a total cluster fuck that this whole thing requires vendors to implement plugins. The VAAI ESX to array interface should have been defined as a network protocol. It would be extremely simple. Far, far simpler than NFS v3, and far, far, far, far simpler than VVOLs, which VMware is now trying to get vendors to implement.

    2) The guy whose fault this is, I think, is the CTO of Pernix.

    3) Occasionally we get a customer call where their ESX host is blowing up (purple screen) and *our* VAAI plugin was installed, among others, so they are calling everybody and looking for answers. However, reviewing the log files, we see messages that are obviously from a Pernix ESX plugin. These log messages contain the usual type of content. The message prefixes give file names and line numbers. In the messages we saw, the line numbers were IIRC in the 6000's range. Who the f puts 6000+ lines of code into one source file in one plugin? To boot, the code looked to be reimplementing TCP, at least going by the semantics of the message -- reporting things like sequence and ack numbers. So, we told the customer to talk to those guys, and haven't heard back.

    4) Get a real architecture.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      In other words, the bubble has burst and the balloon is deflating.

      Apparently, rapidly.

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        I wouldn't write them off entirely. They have great technology with multiple fairly easy routes for pivoting. I guarantee you that with minimal (we're talking a few months of code + QA) they could have an excellent new product line that would actually sell quite well.

        The question is not one of capability. Pernix has a lot of very, very smart people working for it. The question isn't even one of money; the extant product is good enough to attract another round if they are willing to pivot.

        The question of Pernix's continued existence rests entirely on how large and uncompromising the ego of the founders is. FVP is the "baby" of the founders. They are incredibly emotionally invested in it. They risked a great deal to see it brought to market.

        Worse, Pernix hired expensive bodies and put their personal and professional reputations on the line defending it's validity...and in some cases they laid into - or allowed staff that work for them to lay into - other companies and even other individuals for daring to challenge the basic assumptions upon which the product was built. Anyone who asked questions, suggested that read only server side caching might be better, HCI might be better, that there could be economic or practical issues with Pernix's implementation...these people were publicly pilloried and ridiculed by some of the most powerful and prominent members of the virtualization community.

        Members with some fairly direct ties to Pernix.

        A pivot is technically possible. But a pivot is also a very public admission that Pernix were out of bounds in how they treated others and in the cocksure and aggressive attitude they espoused.

        Some people can accept this. Either they're sociopaths and simply view the whole affair as "just business", pivot and move on...or they are decent human beings, apologize and move on. Either way, there are some clear paths forward that allow a pivot without there needing to be life-altering stress or compromise of personal dignity.

        But for some people, this simply can't happen. The emotional investment into "their baby" is too great. A pivot simply can't be accepted, and they'll ride that thing right into the ground.

        As a writer, I sympathize. Editors kill my babies all the time.

        I don't know how the people in charge of Pernix will play this. A pivot absolutely is needed. There are obvious and non-obvious directions that could make them a stupid amount of money and grab a lot of market share while allowing them to retain and reuse a lot of good code.

        Will they do it? That remains to be seen...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The problem with these guys is they are one vmware feature release away from obscurity.

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