Thursday, August 26, 2010

Barron's: Takeover candidates in storage

Barron's
What is left to possibly buy?
Compellent Technologies (CML): Compellent offers automated tiered-storage solutions that dynamically migrates data to the optimal storage tier based on frequency of access. This helps in that there are expensive, fast Hard Disk Drives (HDD), and cheaper, slow ones. Compellent's software helps with this issue; however, many other vendors are coming out with their own tiering software, making Compellent less relevant and differentiated. We don't follow the company, and don't believe that their technology is truly needed by any of our major vendors. With that being said, many of those that have followed 3PAR thought the same thing about that company's offerings.


Isilon Systems (ISLN): Isilon's Scale-out Storage systems provide a high performance, high scalability system for managing file-based data and applications in a clustered storage solution. Mainly their software is helpful for a few industries like motion pictures in that Isilon's system can handle very large files that are not typical Word, Excel, e-mail kinds of items. Audio and digital images are also logical to be used with an Isilon solution. Isilon focuses on industry verticals of the government, geospatial, higher education, energy and others.



CommVault Systems (CVLT): CommVault offers modular data-management software solutions to support backup and recovery management; data deduplication; virtual infrastructure, storage optimization and eDiscovery/compliance. It's not immediately clear for whom in our coverage universe CommVault's solutions would be complementary. Backup is a much needed capability, but we don't believe its growing as fast as the need for