For more thoughts on the startup growth process, see my related article, “The CEO Shuffle“

Scaling Out

Panasas, of Fremont, CA, is a provider of network-attached storage (NAS) systems and was founded in 1999 by the legendary Garth Gibson, known as the father of RAID. ParaScale, right down the road in Cupertino, sells a cloud storage software layer and was started five years later by Cameron Bahar of Scale8 and Teradata.

Both of these companies are in the scale-out business, enabling massive file storage systems for the largest applications. Panasas is more traditional, relying on NAS protocols and a clustered file system for conventional applications. ParaScale stepped into the cloud storage territory, combining Linux-based storage nodes into a file store with HTTP, NFS, FTP, and WebDAV accessibility.

The two companies have also seen key competitors scooped up in the last year: Panasas shared the scale-out NAS market with IBRIX (now HP), Exanet (now Dell), and ONStor (now LSI). Earlier this month, ParaScale watched Bycast go to NetApp.

Panasas Names Pairman

Panasas has named Faye Pairman, formerly of 3ware and AMCC, to replace Randy Strahan as CEO. Although Strahan held that position for years, the Register suggests he was a bench warmer brought in by investors, Mohr, Davidow Ventures. The Pairman press release supports this, calling Strahan “interim CEO,” though that term was not previously used by the company.

With IBRIX, Exanet, and ONStor gone, the scale-out NAS musical chairs game is winding down. IBM has its own scale-out NAS offering, SONAS, which is based on their GPFS technology. Symantec released FileStore, their own scale-out NAS product, in October of 2009. HP seems happier with IBRIX than they were with PolyServe, and Dell and LSI won’t likely need any more technology. NAS leader, NetApp, has finally integrated the scale-out technology they acquired way back in 2003 from Spinnaker, and EMC is busy integrating their Celerra NAS and Clariion SAN lines. Perhaps the new SGI or Oracle-nee-Sun are shopping?

But perhaps Panasas has an IPO in mind instead. They claim profitability, and that market is beginning to heat up! And the market is kinder now – witness this quarter’s success for public scale-out NAS vendor Isilon (NASDAQ:ISLN).

ParaScale Gets Fehrnstrom

ParaScale has made no official announcement as of yet regarding their CEO change, the company’s web site shows that Sajai Krishnan is no longer CEO. His replacement is Ken Fehrnstrom, who is said to have managed “business development activities inclusive of acquisitions, equity investments, divestiture of non-core business assets, and partnership programs” at Ascend Communications. Interestingly, the ParaScale bio omits that Fehrnstrom is also the former President and COO of managed storage provider StorageNetworks, a prototype for today’s cloud storage service providers.

Beth Winkowski, ParaScale’s PR contact, confirmed the change in leadership in an email message:

ParaScale has appointed a new CEO, Ken Fehrnstrom, for the next stage of its growth. As ParaScale gains market traction, Ken as a multi-time CEO, stands ready to rapidly scale the business.

Sajai cultivated industry-leading recognition for ParaScale in record time, delivered its first product to market and seen it through several significant new releases, and earned the confidence of many brand-name customers and partners.  He has served as CEO for nearly two years.  Sajai has assisted Ken in his transition before leaving the company.

Note: We initially overlooked the mention of Fehrnstrom’s StorageNetworks tenure in the ParaScale bio. It is, in fact, mentioned there.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Panasas, Parascale Shuffle CEOs For Growth
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

Unlike IBRIX, which sold software to transform commodity hardware into a clustered NAS solution, ONStor designed both the hardware and software included in their home-grown products. The company also re-sold Fujitsu’s Eternus and Nexsan SATA storage systems and Tek-Tools software. ONStor raised $80 million in its 9 years of operation.

LSI has found success supplying hardware components to the storage and networking markets. In April, the company purchased the 3ware RAID adapter business from AMCC. LSI’s storage operations were to be spun out as Engenio in a 2004 IPO that never happened. That operation later re-joined the LSI mothership, combining with the storage controller business. This is where ONStor will land as well. LSI manufactures components on an OEM basis for many in the storage industry, including BlueArc, IBM, MaXXan, Sepaton, and Sun.

What does LSI get for their $25 million?

• ONStor’s EverON software, which powers its NAS and IP storage product lines and includes the StorFS scalable file system. EverON offers clustering with a global namespace, automated pooling and provisioning, and snapshots.
• The Bobcat and Cougar Broadcom-powered NAS gateway hardware platforms offer energy-efficient and scalable virtualized and clustered NAS in front of existing SAN or NAS storage capacity using the EverON OS.
• The Pantera system uses Intel Xeon CPUs and adds iSCSI to the mix. It uses a different operating system which leverages ZFS.
• ONStor also re-sold the Fujitsu Eternus 2000 and 4000 Fibre Channel SAN storage systems.

LSI is likely to be eager to leverage the EverON software and Bobcat/Cougar platforms with their OEM partners. Expect many vendors (ahem: IBM) to quickly counter HP’s new IBRIX-powered scalable NAS with LSI-powered alternatives. The Pantera seems less-likely to be of interest to OEMs, being based on commodity hardware and software. And continuation of the Eternus line seems flat-out illogical.

More coverage: Terri McClure and Mark Peters of ESG

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | LSI Picks Up ONStor
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story