More Beaver Tales

If it's not the heat, it's the friggin' humidity. And now, after weeks of being one very sweaty beaver, I got soaked to the bone yesterday by a torrential rainstorm. Good thing I was carrying my waterproof notepad. Trust me, no beaver leaves home without one.

So anyway, despite the usual summertime where-the-hell-is-everybody slowdown, I've had several interesting (and odorous) items chucked into my bungalow. Keep 'em coming, people. You know where to find me: [email protected].

Dear Bob the Beaver,

I heard LightSand Communications Corp. is interested in buying or merging with SANcastle Technologies Inc. Know anything?

SAN In My ShortsDear Sandy,

The two SAN extension startups aren't telling me boo, but such a hookup makes sense. A couple of my sources say they've heard rumblings of this: "LightSand is sniffing pretty hard around SANcastle these days," says one. [Confidential to LightSand CEO Philip Black: You can get brain damage from doing that!]

The pairing is logical because the companies have complementary product offerings: LightSand has focused on storage over Sonet; SANcastle links Fibre Channel over IP, and more recently has developed a "Fibre Channel router" designed to interconnect SAN switches from different vendors (see LightSand Buffs Up Optical SANs and SANcastle Retreats to FC Kingdom). Put 'em together and what have you got? Bibbidy-bobbedy-boo? Well, not only that, but you've got a much stronger story than either of these guys has separately. Note, though, that a combined LightSand/SANcastle would still have to contend with much larger SAN extension equipment vendors, including CNT (Nasdaq: CMNT), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), and Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT).

Best o' luck, compadres! Hopefully you'll wind up in better circumstances than the still-stuck-in-limbo IP SAN gateway startup SAN Valley Systems Inc. (see Emulex Jilts SAN Valley).

Dear Bob the Beaver,What's the latest on Pillar Data Systems, the storage startup personally bankrolled by Larry Ellison? [See Larry's Stealth Storage Startup.]

— Lot's Wife

Dear Salty,

I went straight to the source on this one: Mike Workman, the ex-IBMer who's president and CEO of Pillar. He tells me the company is still targeting general availability of its storage system for the first quarter of 2004.

Details remain sketchy about what Pillar is working on, exactly. But Workman provides some clues. The disk storage system will handle both SAN and NAS, including support for both CIFS and NFS protocols. He says the hardware side is "pretty much done, works, and looks great... SAN performance is awesome, NAS is being worked." Pillar, Workman claims, is currently coming in under budget. (Its funding reportedly consists of $100 million from Big Daddy Ellison, though company officials won't confirm this.) It has a headcount of 240 – "huge for a startup," concedes Workman – but still under plan by about 5 percent.And how's Larry Ellison as a boss? "Larry knows a lot about what we're doing, but lets me do it," says Workman. "He is truly great to work for, and I am not saying that because I have to. He is sharp and practical. He gets monthly updates. Occasionally, he asks detailed questions on what we're doing in some area, like the file system, or development tools, and so far he and I have agreed completely about the difference between 'neat technology' and what the customer needs and expects."

Sounds like a match made in... San Jose (and I'm not saying that because I have to). We'll see how "awesome" Pillar's performance is soon enough.

Dear Bob the Beaver,

In one of your previous columns you mentioned that one of the IT groups at Boeing was considering deploying a bunch of Cisco's SAN switches. What happened to that?

— GooseDear Goose,

Apparently, it's happened. Boeing's federal group bought ten MDS 9509 switches – priced at a sweetheart deal of less than $1,000 per port, according to one of my Seattle-area buds. He says Cisco bought back the group's existing Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) switches at the amortization price. "It's a very insidious way of lowering the price without having that show up on the books," says my confidant, since Cisco can now account for those Brocade switches it bought as an asset. "Cisco is buying market share right now."

Another twist on this development is that Boeing recently put two McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) Intrepid 6064 directors into its corporate data center in Mesa, Ariz., along with McData's SANavigator software to manage those switches and four Brocade SilkWorm 2800s. Elsewhere, as I noted previously, the aircraft maker has deployed a couple of Brocade 12000s. You know, I'll bet you 50 bucks that Boeing has some Gadzoox switches floating around somewhere...

Dear Bob the Beaver,

QLogic Corp. won a massive deal for its switches with Lockheed Martin Corp. What's the story?— Penta Gone

Dear Penta,

Right, so this Lockheed Martin deal is said to be the largest channel deal in QLogic's history. The distributor was Bell Microproducts (Nasdaq: BELM). I'm told the sale consisted entirely of QLogic's SANbox2-16 16-port switches (not the 64-port model, as the guys at RBC Capital Markets had reported).

My sources didn't have an exact dollar figure for the Lockheed order, but it was easily in the millions of dollars: It included several hundred of the 16-port switches, which will be installed (in redundant configurations) in 32 nuclear submarines. "And this is just the beginning," says an industry source in the know. SANs on subs? Man, didn't these guys see Das Boot?!

Dear Bob the Beaver,Ron Totah, Brocade's senior technical marketing manager, has left to join a startup. What do you make of this?

— RTFM

Dear RTFM,

I can only guess that he's gone to greener pastures to escape the Brocade pressure cooker. Mr. Totah headed up the technical analysis team at Brocade (a.k.a. the FUD Squad) whose mission is to find shortcomings in competitors' products. Most recently, his team thought they found something fishy with Cisco's MDS 9509 switch, but apparently their test was just misconfigured (see Did Brocade Bungle Cisco Test? and Brocade & Cisco: Who's Out of Order?). Ron, if you're out there, give me a shout!

Dear Bob the Beaver,What's the deal with this Seabiscuit movie? Are we really meant to believe Depression-era Americans were inspired to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by a racehorse?

— Flicka

Dear Friend,

I can't help you on this one. Every equine-themed "blockbuster" from Hollywood since National Velvet has been a stinker in my book. I mean, seriously, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron? The Horse Whisperer? Yentl?!? Please.

Smell ya on the flipside, folks. Stay dry. And hey! Don't forget to check out my previous columns: Switch Hits, Live and Let Die, Scratch My Back, and Dear Byte and Switch....

Figure 1:

— Bob the Beaver