Storage Nation

Chuck Hollis had an excellent post last week, discussing caching.   About 10 years ago a small team that I was a part of looked at starting a company that would do something similar to what IBM's SVC does.  The idea was to create a SAN front end controller with a lot of cache memory that would virtualize  "downstream" storage and provide performance boosts through various techniques such as caching, striping, and multi-way mirroring.  We gave up on the idea when it became apparent to us that the project was quite a bit larger than we initially thought and it was unclear when we would ever have sufficient resources to get a competitive product to market. I think we could have sold the idea to venture capital investors who were throwing money at storage startups, but we couldn't sell it to ourselves. For those of you that wonder why I tend to think SVC is an important product, that's why – I know some of the things IBM did to make it work and I admire their ability to bring it to market