Liquid Audio considers its data-center infrastructure to be a significant competitive advantage because it enables continuous application availability that yields uninterrupted service to customers. Another example on the outsourced-storage services side is ITIS Services, a company founded by former EMC sales executives. The firm is strictly focused on storage-networking consulting and integration at Fortune 500 companies. ITIS can't hire people fast enough to keep up with new business demands at clients such as large financial institutions, publishing houses, and industrial manufacturers. And it is still early in the SAN game.
Companies continue to innovate next-generation solutions.
VI is being deployed today on fibre channel and will be deployed in the future on InfiniBand as well. It has become much more about application management than the disk and tape connectivity of first-generation storage networks. All told, it's really the business application that matters. So, while storage is still not necessarily sexy, there's money to be made playing in the SANbox. More Perspectives biography Jennifer Fonstad is a managing director at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.