What's up with NeoScale?

JT added a comment a few days ago. The answer is something I've been sitting on for a number of weeks. I apologize for appearing to ignore the comment but it's not for me to repeat the contents of a private conversation I had weeks before hand when the info was non-public at the time.

I heard that MTI had cratered shortly after it happened (Eye of Sauron folks) so it wasn't difficult to see who'd be sucked down with it, at this stage you should have heard that NeoScale went insolvent over night and have had to refocus. Just another startup story going badly wrong. It happens.

There's a ton of rumors floating around the place about who'll do what and when but I'm not willing to speculate on any of it as I don't have any extra insight (yet) as to who's speaking to whom about what.

What facts we have are that the encryption appliance business is "lumpy" (Dan Warmenhoven's word not mine) it hasn't turned into the license to print money that some people were expecting.

I'm on record of never being that much of a fan of the appliance approach due to port count and scalability issues those are geeky reasons to be down on something I'll admit but I've come to accept that it's a viable solution to some customers data at rest encryption problems. It however isn't a solution to all problems like some proponents of the approach would have you believe.

It's early days in the data encryption space so there's more than a few surprises, setbacks and reversals of fortune yet to occur.

Comments

[JTCrawford]

I apreciate the candid answers to my Neoscale question. In your response you said that you were not a fan of the appliance approach to encryption. Since we have to regroup now, due to our Neoscale friends cratering, what is your recommended approach for SAN encrption to begin looking into.

Thanks

[Storagezilla]

Hi JT I suppose it depends on what you need to do. SAN based I know EMC are working on PowerPath with RSA Encryption, only useful if you're a PowerPath user I know. Cisco also have a Storage Media Encryption option for their switches right now that's for tape only but disk is due this year. You can be sure Brocade have something in the works too. (Hint, hint)