Jack Rahner, VP of AlphaStaff, Jason Somer of Aethion Systems and Jason Glauch of Compellent join Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org at VMworld 2010.
The group discusses storage virtualization, automated data movement, VMware, VDI and Flash.
Interview with Compellent CEO Phil Soran, Live from #theCUBE
David Vellante: Phil you have done an amazing job — starting several companies amazingly in the middle of the country. You don't think of that as a hotbed of IT but there's a lot of talent out there, isn't there?
Phil Soran: I actually think it is a competitive advantage. There's a big competitive advantage to being in Minneapolis. In the old mainframe days you had IBM and the "BUNCH". One of the BUNCH was headquartered in Minneapolis. There's a lot of innovation that happened there. One of the big ones was CDC — Control Data Corp. — that would fund entrepreneurial companies inside the company. I'm not sure the venture community got well established in Minneapolis, but the engineering community sure did. We've been able to take advantage of that. The quality of talent we have, they're more loyal, more affordable. All the engineers we started with we still have at Compellent; they don't pop around they way they might out here in the Valley. And just the quality they come out with, this enterprise-class architecture is a real differentiator for them.
A lot of the storage [vendors] come out there. All of Seagate's high-end enterprise drive division, all that's done out there; the old Veritas operations; CNT, the old Channel Network company; Network Systems. There's a lot of ecosystem for storage talent.
David Vellante: You know I'm from New England and you remember the days of DEC and Wang and Prime and DG, and then we had some tough times back there. But now entrepreneurs like yourself have put together teams of talent, and they're really sharp people, they're loyal, and they've created a lot of value for customers, for investors. So maybe take us back to the early days of Compellent. I know Larry Aszmann [Compellent co-founder and CTO] a little bit and have great respect for him and his team. Talk about the vision you guys had when you launched the company, because you've really seen it through, and I want the viewers to understand where you came from.
Phil Soran: Three of us founded the company: myself, Larry Aszmann as you mentioned and John Guider who's our COO and also very visionary in the storage space. if you look at our backgrounds there's a lot of storage DNA there. I go back to IBM and was a storage specialist there. They've founded other companies. They've done 11 storage subsystems in their careers, and all of them have been successful. They did the first blade servers back in the late '80s and early '90s. So there has just been a lot of innovation coming out of John and Larry's brains, and here I get to take the ride with them.
Here's what we saw: In 2002 a lot of things were happening in the world that influenced us. We had retired for a little bit and started meeting in our basement — in Minneapolis it's too cold to start a company in the garage, you get frozen to death, so you have to go to the basement. But in 2002 9/11 had happened, I don't know if you remember the great northeastern power outage, brownouts, for some reason there were a lot of weather events as well. Enron was getting going, and state of retention was getting bigger.
What we saw was an opportunity a lot of high-end functionality was not available to masses of companies. It was too expensive, hard to implement, in some ways maybe unaffordable. So what we said was we want to design a system that has twice the functionality of any system on the market, high end or low end, but do it in a manner that was 10 times easier to use and at a price that is affordable to the first-time centralized storage buyer.
And I think we hit the ball out of the park. Some of the core things we focused on were efficiency — we saw that the way storage was provisioned 70% was wasted. The other thing is that 80%-to-90% of their data was inactive — they don't look at it for 30 days or more. So you have to take advantage of those phenomena and get the efficiencies down for them. I think we did it.
See the full article, "Storage Needs to be Simple, Flexible, Automated, Compellent CEO Phil Soran says at VMworld 2010' by KRISTEN NICOLE, here:
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/09/20/storage-needs-to-be-simple-flexible-automated-compellent-ceo-phil-soran-says-at-vmworld-2010/
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Compellent Customers Talk About Simplifying Storage For VMware | VMworld 2010
Jack Rahner, VP of AlphaStaff, Jason Somer of Aethion Systems and Jason Glauch of Compellent join Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org at VMworld 2010.
The group discusses storage virtualization, automated data movement, VMware, VDI and Flash.
Interview with Compellent CEO Phil Soran, Live from #theCUBE
David Vellante: Phil you have done an amazing job — starting several companies amazingly in the middle of the country. You don't think of that as a hotbed of IT but there's a lot of talent out there, isn't there?
Phil Soran: I actually think it is a competitive advantage. There's a big competitive advantage to being in Minneapolis. In the old mainframe days you had IBM and the "BUNCH". One of the BUNCH was headquartered in Minneapolis. There's a lot of innovation that happened there. One of the big ones was CDC — Control Data Corp. — that would fund entrepreneurial companies inside the company. I'm not sure the venture community got well established in Minneapolis, but the engineering community sure did. We've been able to take advantage of that. The quality of talent we have, they're more loyal, more affordable. All the engineers we started with we still have at Compellent; they don't pop around they way they might out here in the Valley. And just the quality they come out with, this enterprise-class architecture is a real differentiator for them.
A lot of the storage [vendors] come out there. All of Seagate's high-end enterprise drive division, all that's done out there; the old Veritas operations; CNT, the old Channel Network company; Network Systems. There's a lot of ecosystem for storage talent.
David Vellante: You know I'm from New England and you remember the days of DEC and Wang and Prime and DG, and then we had some tough times back there. But now entrepreneurs like yourself have put together teams of talent, and they're really sharp people, they're loyal, and they've created a lot of value for customers, for investors. So maybe take us back to the early days of Compellent. I know Larry Aszmann [Compellent co-founder and CTO] a little bit and have great respect for him and his team. Talk about the vision you guys had when you launched the company, because you've really seen it through, and I want the viewers to understand where you came from.
Phil Soran: Three of us founded the company: myself, Larry Aszmann as you mentioned and John Guider who's our COO and also very visionary in the storage space. if you look at our backgrounds there's a lot of storage DNA there. I go back to IBM and was a storage specialist there. They've founded other companies. They've done 11 storage subsystems in their careers, and all of them have been successful. They did the first blade servers back in the late '80s and early '90s. So there has just been a lot of innovation coming out of John and Larry's brains, and here I get to take the ride with them.
Here's what we saw: In 2002 a lot of things were happening in the world that influenced us. We had retired for a little bit and started meeting in our basement — in Minneapolis it's too cold to start a company in the garage, you get frozen to death, so you have to go to the basement. But in 2002 9/11 had happened, I don't know if you remember the great northeastern power outage, brownouts, for some reason there were a lot of weather events as well. Enron was getting going, and state of retention was getting bigger.
What we saw was an opportunity a lot of high-end functionality was not available to masses of companies. It was too expensive, hard to implement, in some ways maybe unaffordable. So what we said was we want to design a system that has twice the functionality of any system on the market, high end or low end, but do it in a manner that was 10 times easier to use and at a price that is affordable to the first-time centralized storage buyer.
And I think we hit the ball out of the park. Some of the core things we focused on were efficiency — we saw that the way storage was provisioned 70% was wasted. The other thing is that 80%-to-90% of their data was inactive — they don't look at it for 30 days or more. So you have to take advantage of those phenomena and get the efficiencies down for them. I think we did it.
See the full article, "Storage Needs to be Simple, Flexible, Automated, Compellent CEO Phil Soran says at VMworld 2010' by KRISTEN NICOLE, here:
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/09/20/storage-needs-to-be-simple-flexible-automated-compellent-ceo-phil-soran-says-at-vmworld-2010/
