Memory Fails

5:20 PM -- You didn't have to read between the lines much to get that Mark Douglas really likes flexibility, simplicity, and automation. (See Storage Love at eHarmony.)

Douglas, one of the end-users showcasing technical innovation at SNW this week, built the brand-new networked storage for the online singles' site that's not even six years old yet.

No legacy boxes to deal with. No forklift upgrade concerns or stranded investment. A vendor's dream come true, right?

Wrong. An established (and unnamed) vendor dispatched a dutiful salesperson working from a very tired playbook.

"They give us a big thick presentation about how they were going to store our data and lots of diagrams and charts about striping this data here, and storing that data over there," Douglas told the San Diego audience this morning. "It was like a silicon vendor telling me how they'd lay down my memory on their chips -- I totally checked out at that point."Needless to say, the meeting didn't end in a signed purchase order.

It's a new day in storage, and more customers are putting the big guys on notice. They're spending their money with startups. And it's great to see at least one high-profile user voting with his feet when greeted with the same tired storage spiel.

Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch