An askance view of what's amazing, asinine or ahead in storage 
Although there’s plenty of high-tech business around where I live in Colorado (hence the ‘Silicon Mountain’ moniker), it’s clearly nothing like the Bay Area. So it’s hard not to be a tad more personally interested – often with friends affected – when the ebbs and flows of business affect IT vendors in my backyard. Storage especially. Strangely, what really brought this home to me was when I got a call last week from my local paper, the Boulder Daily Camera.
The paper rang to get my take on the Copan news – I’d been following the story in a rather detached way, but this jolted me to recall that this was local.As you probably know, late last week we saw what was left of Copan being absorbed into SGI. Copan’s MAID was a great, but essentially singular, technology. Unfortunately a large percentage of its functionality – certainly the most important economic aspects of spinning down disk drives that aren’t being actively used – is also available elsewhere, and arguably provided in a better way. EMC, Fujitsu, HDS and others offer spin-down; Nexsan’s graduated spin-down ability is actually called AutoMAID – and while important to Nexsan and its users, it is ultimately a feature (albeit a valuable one), but not the entire company.
It’s been a sad reduction of jobs in CO at Copan…..but maybe some of the displaced folks will find employment at Oracle (aka Sun aka StorageTek) just down the road from Longmont in Broomfield. It’s a different story there – after the much delayed acquisition of Sun by Oracle it looks as if the new owner is going to take its storage portfolio seriously. As the purchase was finalized, Oracle announced layoffs: no surprise there….but what was a surprise was that the number of new jobs Oracle said it would create actually exceeds those being cut. A net gain – now there’s a positive sign. By the way, Oracle now has a pretty interesting set of storage products to add to its toybox – without the market-reach limitations of the VC-funded-Copan, and with a reputation for execution that exceeds Sun’s laid-back ‘it’s cool so build it’ style, it could become a real player in the business……which I hope will lead to good news for the job prospects around Silicon Mountain.
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