What was supposed to be written here was sent to /dev/null when I realized that there was no way I could structure the post without leaving enough clues for people to get a pretty good idea of what was on the boil.
I'm not fond of being taken out back & beaten with the rubber hose (Though I certainly know of people who pay for such things and enjoy it a lot), so I decided to drop the topic. We'll get to it later, like maybe mid-2008 or early 2009 or 2151 depending on how things turn out..
Anyhoo, an interesting article floated across my desk for the second time via an internal round up performed by a fellow EMC employee. I read this when it was first written but never blogged about it, now's a good time though.
Moshe Yanai, the father of the Symmetrix, moved his interests beyond Diligent and into an Israeli startup called XIV Information Systems a while back. Whatever Moshe does will always be followed with intense interest by some parties. He's still regarded as "Daddy" by some people who've been here for a while, other people believe that both he and the company were prisoners of the Symmetrix cash cow while he ruled the roost. The absolute truth of the matter is probably different again, but I used to be one of the former until I realized that the world didn't end when he and EMC parted ways and now I believe the latter. I'm guessing at this stage nearly everyone else is in the latter category too.
Quick note: You can imagine how well Clariion went down inside the towers of Symmetrix Engineering when the company bought DG. The reality however was that this mid-range product, and the new focus on the mid-range market it brought, is what sustained EMC when the bubble popped and Symmetrix became a very difficult sale.
Rumblings about Nextra started a while back, I think I saw my first photo of the frame it came in back in 2006. While we know that massively parallel storage architectures, nearly all built from off the shelf components, are in production and running some of the most hyperactive web based applications on the net Nextra was a bit different. Instead of taking the sell 'em cheap rack 'em high server model it had the traditional concept of active/active controllers. Or at least it appeared to as I never got to open one up and take a peek inside.
A few years ago if you'd told me that Moshe was going to start competing against EMC my personal reaction would have been one of horror. Today? Anything he's involved in is yet another player in a galaxy of startups EMC will either compete against or buy if it thinks the technology aligns with what the company is doing and it plugs a gap.
Things change so quickly.
--Updated 12/8/08--
See Barry's Stranger Danger post for an excellent history of Symmetrix development and who the Daddy really is.
