Personalizing The NAS Space - interview with R. Daniel Smith, president and Chief Executive Officer and Steven Paulhus, vice president, business development at StorLogic - Company Operations

Computer Technology Review, Nov, 2000 by R. Daniel Smith

Network Attached Storage from one vendor's perspective

NAS has evolved from a niche storage alternative for low-end networks to a serious storage solution for a much larger market. NAS is now forecasted to grow at over 60% per year, and approach $7 billion in annual revenue by year end 2003. NAS sales are expected to double in this year, and may grow even faster as solutions scale further and add functionality.

To give our readers an insider's point of view on NAS in the Enterprise, we present excerpts from a recent interview with R. Daniel Smith, president and Chief Executive Officer (shown) and Steven Paulhus, vice president, business development at StorLogic (www.storlogic.com) a NAS pioneer headquartered in Lake Mary, Florida. The complete interview is available on the CTR website: www.wwpi.com.

CTR: How did StorLogic come to the NAS space?

DAN: It's actually kind of an interesting story, the company is nine years old. It started really to develop network management utilities for optical media. It was very early in the NAS markets with their own small network attached brick running their embedded software, again handling mostly optical media, CD caching, etc. So the company really has its roots in the NAS environment and really got started because of the early requirements to share CDs and to make it easy for users to be able to manage and share those devices over large integrated networks. So the company really was an earlier pioneer in NAS development. Unfortunately for a number of reasons, it never really developed marketing and sales wise until the last two years when the entire management structure changed. So it's an interesting story, it's almost as if this were a turnaround company in itself because not only did we turn the internals of the company around but we've also completely turned, we think, the paradigm for being able to manage not only optical media now, but also storage and storage applications and applications themselves over large distributed networks.

CTR: StorLogic is the first NAS solution to utilize the Windows NT Embedded 4.0 platform. How did it come about?

DAN: About two years ago, we leveraged the relationship we have with Microsoft to become a beta site for their NT embedded products. So basically, in a nutshell, what we did was we took the NT operating system in a pure headless environment--there's no mouse, there's no monitor, and there's no keyboard--stripped away all the Microsoft IP that you would normally see in the product and wrote our own wrapper around the core operating system. So as a user, you never see NT. You only see SerView, which is our management product. So we have taken what we would consider to be an entirely different path in terms of product development for being able to share, now, not only CDs, but DVD-RAM and DVD-ROM, tapes AlT and DDS, any type of disk drive, any type of manageable storage subsystem, i.e. RAID, up to the point we can actually manage now via a remote agent, your normal NT 4.0 server system.

CTR: How did you bring NT to heel? As you know, it's kind of pushy in terms of mapping storage for its own usage.

DAN: Actually we have a fairly well trained and educated group of programmers who were able to really go through the NT space, separate out the pieces we required, the pieces we didn't require, and around that we wrote an application using Java virtual machine that sort of acts as a virtual interface between all of NT and NTFS and our own UDF and NFS file systems. So it was very easy for us at that point then to manage down a very, very low level all of the disk space, all of the share points, and both logical and physical conditions you see in an NT environment.

CTR: Are you more a block level management or a file level management device?

DAN: Right now we are a file level management utility. We do have some opportunities coming up to change that, but right now we specifically concentrate in a NAS environment. We have a pretty robust set of products. that are soon hitting the marketplace or has hit the marketplace that really leverage a company's ability to distribute storage and the application down to the user level, yet maintain centralized management and centralized control over the operating environment itself.

CTR: Does that mean you're going to be expanding to the SAN space?

DAN: We feel like we obviously have an innate bridge into the SAN space, whatever that space eventually becomes. So we think we got some clear technology paths, there's a whole set of issues that I believe the industry as a whole has to overcome, but I think as a player in the NAS market, we provide a well rounded, highly functional device that does both single function and multi-function bias, yet we have a very clear ability to migrate to SAN as those standards develop.

CTR: How do you see your building on your Microsoft relationship?

DAN: It's NT versus Linux in the embedded space and there's a war. So they're very excited about this space. We've got really two things that we're building on with Microsoft. One is from an engineering technology standpoint. We are very much in tune and have great communication going on from the engineering side. We've just participated in one of their design reviews for the next generation of their embedded NT product. There's a confident dialogue between the engineering groups of both StorLogic and Microsoft. And then we've got the business side, which is the side I'm managing right now where, again, they're excited that we've selected embedded NT as our operating system base for our NAS products, we're the first guys to do it, so they're excited about helping us and making sure that we succeed. In terms of business opportunities we're doing joint road shows, trade shows, sales calls, they're putting StorLogic products in their executive briefing center in Redmond, some of their major district sales office s around the country, they funded a case study, produced a case study on StorLogic that was sent out to their user base and sales people, so there's lots going on there.