Database and Storage Shifts

EMC Corp. increases bid for Iomega Corp. while an EMC director of technology left to join Caringo Inc., a content-addressable storage (CAS) software provider. In other news, Sybase Inc. released a new version of Advantage Database Server.

Focal Points:

• EMC continued its pursuit of Iomega by upping its offer by $27 million to $205.5 million in an all-cash offer. Unlike the first round, where Iomega found the bid lacking and rejected the offer outright, the firm stated it was willing to engage in talks regarding the acquisition. The Iomega board and shareholders need to decide whether to continue pursuing a deal announced last December with the Chinese government or to seek a buyout agreement with EMC. The deal with the Chinese is a stock trade deal and much more complicated than the all-cash EMC offer. On Dec. 12, 2007 Iomega announced it planned to acquire ExcelStor Great Wall Technology, an $800 million hard drive manufacturer based in China, through an exchange of stock.
• The two engineers that created the CAS design back in the 1980s are reunited again at Caringo, the developer of CAStor content storage software that runs on commodity storage. According to company officials, Jan Van Riel has accepted a position as its vice president of advanced technology, a move that reunites him with fellow CAS co-inventor Paul Carpentier, Caringo's co-founder and chief technology officer. Their last company invented CAS technology and was sold to EMC. Van Riel joined EMC as part of the acquisition and remained there for eight years as Director of Technology. Van Riel claims EMC is scaling down the Centera unit and the future of Centera is unclear, which made this opportunity too good to pass up. Caringo's CAStor product is a third-generation storage product technology that uses commodity hardware to implement a storage cluster that improves the scope and economics of content storage, a company official stated.
• Sybase iAnywhere announced the release of Advantage Database Server version 9. The updated features include unique support for the Visual FoxPro 9 file format, significant performance boosts for large transactions, reduced end user configuration requirements and the addition of key functionality including an SQL Debugger and 64-bit platform support. The Advantage Database Server has been ported to run as a native 64-bit application on the 64-bit Microsoft Corp. Windows and Linux platforms. Advantage 9 is now available for purchase. Prices range from $645 for a five-user license to $7870 for an unlimited user license.

Experton Group believes the storage market is undergoing major shifts as vendors seek to satisfy customer demands for low-cost, commodity solutions to the majority of their storage needs. EMC continues its quest to be a one-stop information infrastructure management provider with offerings that address the complex high-end requirements to the volume commodity solutions. The Caringo technology is another example of an expensive enterprise storage offering being reincarnated as a low-cost commodity solution for the masses.

These shifts will force storage providers such as EMC to modify their business model to service both enterprise-unique and commodity environments. The Sybase iAnywhere Advantage 9 not only provides performance gains but now moves the product into the 64-bit generation and advances its longevity by offering a growth path. IT executives should re-evaluate their storage architectures and validate that their target architectures satisfy their corporate needs, are cost-effective, and are consistent with the shifts in the technology.