The multitude of early CEOs swapped out their for industry pros make the exceptions stand out: Bill Gates’ amazing stint at Microsoft and Apple’s birth and rebirth with Steve Jobs are legend. The storage industry has similar Cinderella stories of its own, but Richard Egan’s 22 years at EMC, growing that company from furniture reseller to industry titan, is perhaps best-known.

Although these “American Dream” stories are attractive to entrepreneurs, most IT companies follow quite a different path:

1. The Founder’s Circle – A few visionaries get together around an idea and form a proto-company. They write some code, bolt together some hardware, and call their friends to be beta customers. Maybe they even raise a bit of cash, but no real money comes in at this stage.
2. Building A Real Business – The Smart Guys realize they don’t have the business acumen to really make a go of it, so they bring in some skills. Maybe the head smartie steps aside to become CTO, allowing a trusted partner to take over as CEO. A veteran VP of Sales comes along, too, and the investors pony up seven or eight figures.
3. Stuck In The Middle With You – Two years later and the business hasn’t grown. The hot-shot VP of Sales is long gone, as are all of his guys, leaving only their expense reports behind. The board is getting nervous, but they are sticking with it thanks to positive customer news.
4. The CEO Shuffle – The investors are tired of waiting so they go looking for “someone to take it to the next level.” Maybe they know just the right person, or maybe a friend of a friend plays golf with a guy who used to run a company something like this that went public. Either way, the early CEO is moved aside (or moved out) and the press releases flow.
5. Up, Out, or Repeat – The bets are placed and the cards are drawn, but there isn’t always a verdict. Sometimes the business grows like crazy, maybe even going public. Other times the new guy sells it, maybe to some of his old friends. But more likely the veteran team can’t make it work after all, and the company returns to step 3 or fizzles out due to a lack of funding.

This tale may sound cynical, but it’s actually perfectly reasonable. Even healthy. No one knows what is going to work, and the process is an efficient way of proving out a business.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | The CEO Shuffle
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He talks about how parallel NFS (pNFS) is set to trickle down to the enterprise from the high-performance compute labs. It’s always amusing to me to think of things trickling down to the enterprise storage market, but in this case he’s right – massive clusters (and Panasas for that matter) have yet to make much of a mark on the enterprise computing world.

He goes on to talk about how escalating disk capacity has lead to unacceptable rebuild times in RAID sets. You tell ‘em, Garth! Apparently, he’s been beating the multiple-parity drum since 1989 (!?!) – I hadn’t realized that RAID 6 was that old, since it’s not in the paper, but he claims they invented it, too, way back when. Who am I to contradict the Bob Metcalfe of storage?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Garth Gibson: Still Relevant After All These Years
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.