Something on Rainfinity (And it's creator)

Polly has a cool entry up discussing the BusinessWeek GLOBESPOTTING column featuring Friend-O-Zilla Dr Charles Fan.

Great guy who worked on a great product. (Rainfinity)

Speaking of Rainfinity, walk with me.

Manufacturing customer. DMX for SAN storage another vendor for clustered NAS. That's how the business was segregated and there was no way EMC was getting the NAS business. Don't even bring it up it's not on the table.

EMC went in there to talk about block based virtualisation, and abruptly the conversation changed direction and turned to files.

"Okkkaaayyy. There's an opportunity here, lets talk through this."

It turned out that the NAS systems were mission critical and anytime they took an outage it cost them tens of thousands of yoyos per hour and they wanted a way of non-disruptively re-balancing the workload as different rates of data generation was causing performance bottlenecks at different times.

Also, since some of their systems were coming off lease they were under the gun to perform a tech refresh so disruptive that the planning meetings for it alone had someone from Finance riding shotgun to ensure they were squeezing every possible second out of whatever plan they were going to move forward with. 

They had looked at other offerings but those involved blowing up their existing investment in the value added software from their NAS vendor and the tech team ruled that out.

Went in did a POC, parts to the customer environment weren't supported so they had to be supported by the time everything came out the other end they placed an order. Rainfinity Global File Virtualization appliances go into their production environment and a few months pass.

"How is the Rainfinity GFV implementation working out?"

"It's reduced downtime due to migration by 98% compared to how we used to have to do things."

Nice.

12 months have passed since it went into production.

"Rainfinity. Happy? Or not?"

"We did the numbers recently for everything we're using and Rainfinity delivered 2x ROI within it's first 12 months. I'm happy with that."

Hi ho Silver, away!